accidental discovery for anyone into propagating trees

I sometimes use sheets of tin covered with wood-chips to snuff out obnoxious plants I don't like; poison ivy for example.    I just harvested this wild mulberry from an old sheet I buried at least 2 years ago.   Notice I have a really nice root system there.   It was effortless; just pick it up and put it in a pot or its new spot.   The tin keeps the roots from getting down into the packed soil underneath.

I usually cover the tin, or anything else, with 8 to 12 inches of unpacked wood chips.   Here in the Houston Food Forest, I already have mature pecan trees in place, and so plenty of birds sit up there pooping seeds down.  Now that I know this trick, I'm just gonna start throwing all kinds of tree seeds on there!

It's amazing where trees manage to grow themselves! You'd have thought that the woodchips would be the least hospitable situation....

I find that the commonest place I find tree seedlings is in a hardpacked rock path. I suspect that the temperatures may be more consistent, or maybe there are fewer nibblers.

I like the idea of using the metal sheets as a weed suppressing mulch.

That is a good discovery!

Also the tin for mulch is ingenious too.

I think the tree seedlings might like paths like that because of the lack of competition from herbs? They take longer to grow and so the herbs can easily overtake them. In harsher situations the trees are likely to thrive.

I was in the mountains and pulled up some yellow birch to transplant back home. Actually I went up looking for amelanchiers, but it was only after I pulled them that I realized they were yellow birch! Embarrassingly for someone who has spent so much time with plants… They were growing right out of the stone and came up easily. I planted them back at home and they are both thriving to this day. I transplanted them in spring.

I also saw a few weeks ago a spruce, and a maple, growing out of a stone. They had rooted in the moss, and underneath the mosses their roots crept all along the many feet of rock until, banyan-like, they reached the ground. The implications for why mosses are important, are clear. Trees also love rooting in the rotting trunks of other trees, and many deep forest species will only root there or similarly harsh conditions—in mosses, on nurse logs or nurse stumps.

These kind of hard surfaced mulches function as rain catchments too. With a bit of luck you can move water to a tree or plant that really needs it. I've used roof tiles on a hill for this purpose and i've seen a permaculturist put down a big sheet of EPDM on a hill to fill his pond.

There is a post somewhere here on the forum about growing trees in rocks ... amazing.