10 things I learned planting 1000 trees

A little bit of philosophy, faith, and thoughts for both tree planters and organizational leaders.

In a LinkedIn article from 2019, I wrote:

10 things I learned planting 1000 trees

Last year, while floating on the ocean and drifting between life onboard a steel gray warship and life lived out of a suitcase, I set a goal: Plant 1000 trees before the end of 2019.

Numbers seem to have a certain power over us human types, they both motivate us, and occasionally scare us! I hadn't planted but maybe a handful of trees in my life, and 1000 seemed somewhat of a flippant number. Nevertheless, I am happy to report that we did it! (Months ago actually!)

In such a time as this, with uncertainties in weather and agriculture, energy, economics, and yes, job prospects, trees symbolize a certain resilience and a sense of stability. Tall, strong, and bending and growing with change, I knew planting 1000 trees was a wholesome goal to have. Years from now, they can literally provide my family food, shelter, drink (mmm...cider), heating in the winter, cooling in the summer, fencing, and habitat for wildlife and food for pollinators. All this in addition to beauty!

The process of planting and tending trees provides good insight and analogy for organizational leaders out there.

Below are a few simple (and sometimes cliche) lessons I learned from planting 1000 trees this past year. Perhaps you'll see a few parallels which may help you or your own organization achieve your goals?

10 things I learned from planting 1000 trees:
1) The act of speaking a wholesome goal into existence in front of your social network is a tremendous motivator for personal accountability. Don't hoard your hopes! Share them! Not only does it benefit you, but it helps others enjoy playing a part in the adventure, cheering you along the way.

2)  You can carry WAY more value than you think you can, especially when you consider that value is a function of time and potential, among other things. Sure you can't lift 500 tons of logs at once, but you CAN fit 500, one year-old pine trees in the same volume as that large briefcase you are carrying! In other words, great things start small and grow with time.

3) Those who care about you tend to show up when you need them the most...regardless of the weather! Yes, even your in-laws!  People are more important than projects, and I never would have accomplished my goal when I did if it wasn't for family support. Need I say anything about division of labor?

4) The things unseen and happening underground are important, and you probably do not understand what the heck is going on. There are millions of micro-organisms in a small handful of good soil, and it took time and good design for the beautiful and messy complexity to arrange precisely how it did. This dance provides a foundation of life for plants, so give roots space to do root things and integrate with this complexity. Plant neither too deep, nor too shallow, nor too firm, nor too lose. Also, a tree may look alive on top, but if the roots are dead and not in good contact with this soil, it's dead for good. (There are numerous business and organizational leadership analogies to draw from here, as you can imagine.)

5) You can plant it, but you can't make it grow. A couple months after planting the trees, I couldn't help but focus on the ones that didn't make it while disregarding the ones that were doing fantasticly. Always be on the lookout for #negativitybias.

6) Birds perch on tall, strong branches. The higher up you go, or the more you reach out, the more "manure" you'll have to deal with. There is a tendency for both strong folks at the top as well as folks who like to innovate in an organization to take a lot of crap. That said, bird droppings are high in phosphorous and a free source of fertilizer. There is always a bright side.

7) Be careful, because you can kill a new tree by over-fertilizing it. You may think you are doing good, but be gentle on the new guys. Water it down a little at first until the roots are well established.

8) Weeds are not "bad". They are simply the competition taking advantage of a niche in the soil horizon. When they die, they will become part of the soil, and compost for the trees and microbes around them. Besides, perennials tend to beat annuals, and there is plenty of space for everyone. The trees will grow deeper, and quality and resilience beat quantity in the long run. You don't always have to mow down the competition right off the bat.

9) Leave plenty of space for patience, prayer and miracles!

Three examples:

-Many a time I thought my persimmon trees were long dead, only to discover they just needed a little more time to adjust to new soil. Buds eventually appeared, and now they look healthier than our apple trees! Same thing happened with my favorite fig tree. I've also seen a beautiful pomegranate tree go through some tough times, and then spring back to life.

-One evening, I found myself feeling completely hopeless in my own ability to irrigate the trees during a dry spell. A few hours later, I happily went home completely drenched in rain. Prayer is valuable.

-I lost several sugar maples over the spring, and serendipitously, my sister messaged me randomly about a neighbor who was giving away dozens of trees for free. The trees were--you guessed it--sugar maples! They were stronger than the original ones I bought, and there were more than enough to replace the losses!

10) Keep on growing! Now that I have the larger tree seedlings established in the ground, it's time for me to shift focus to other design aspects. I'm excited to continue to learn (and share) more with you! Keep on growing, leaders!

Source

Nice. Can you please provide more details?

1. What types of trees and what was their survival rate? Also, what's your hardiness zone and annual precipitation?
2. What did you provide for each tree?
3. How did you get so many?
4. What was your protocol for putting them in the ground?

Skyler Weber wrote:Nice. Can you please provide more details?

1. What types of trees and what was their survival rate? Also, what's your hardiness zone and annual precipitation?

Humid temperate; 44" rain annual; hot summers; cold winters.  The night of the first day we planted it got down to 19*F.  TBD on "rate" of survival.  Here's qualitative and anecdotal though:

Robinia pseudoacacia & hispida Great!  Some were +10ft tall at less than 3 years old (abbreviation is yo);and they were planted when 6-10" tall @ 1yo.  I'm debating doing some pleaching trials with them, as some limbs which were nearly broken to the horizontal (due to deer rubbing or herbivory, we think, in the first year or so) survived even and got nice and thick even while horizontal.  Some black locusts' leaders were "strangled" from some kind of leguminous weedy plant tendrils, which cut them to the cambium.   So only a few died at the hands of weeds, and some are mangled due to deer.

Pinus sylvestris Good. Some of these may have frozen to death in the first night on site.  Fun story: I was sleeping in the back of a vehicle, and remember waking up it was so cold.  It was about 19*F, and I turned to see a dozen or so of the little trees in their bag and box with their roots beside me in nothing but a block of slushy ice.  Another dozen or so fell out of my cart at some point without us noticing on the planting day, and they were discovered at a later date.  They were still green so we had some hope they would survive, but they didn't.

Malus Good.  Started slow to leaf out.  Slow on growth generally.  Some herbivory nips off the tops.  Heavy weed and grass competition.

Diospyros virginiana Good.  Same as above, but just a little slower.  It felt like months had passed until the leafing buds were definitely looking nice.

Acer saccharum Poor.  I don't think the foresters were ready for my pick-up order, despite a preparatory phone call I made in the days prior to pick-up.  These trees were the smallest of all of then, at less than 6" @ 1yo.  The foresters advised potting them up for a year prior to plant out, but I was eager to STUN them in the ground asap and not baby sit them for a year.

Juglans nigra TBA.  These trees were 2yo at planting I think and were the tallest at ~12" (not including root).  They had the most developed root system, but I haven't checked up on them in a while.  Btw, the more developed root systems took longer to plant:

younger trees = cheaper trees, faster to plant.
older trees = more expensive, slower to plant.

2. What did you provide for each tree?

Varied.  My most important goal was to just get them in the ground.  Some spot mulch for 1yo fruit bearers and maples.  For maples, only an inch or three deep, out a couple feet radius around each one to suppress competition.  Probably too much for the maples.  I did my best to keep the little stems clear of mulch.  Not much success with the maples.  Might have been too much nitrogen (home-made, so to speak) for some of the maples.  Might have been fungal for others, or heat stress, or herbivory, or not enough moisture, or just that they were so tiny at 1yo, and the stress did them in.  Not sure.  

Herbivory protection.  I made some improvised wire and dead thorny bramble "cages" and teepees for some of the fruit trees.  Some plastic netting around bamboo stakes for others.  For some maples, I also took some branches after felling trees, and arranged them to poke around the tree in an attempt to help with herbivory.  Jury is still out on maple success numbers.

Some carboard and as much mulch as I could carry in vehicles for the fruit trees periodically.  (Later, some collected surface water carried in jugs during the first summer dry spell for the fruit trees, plus answered prayer for rain.)  For pines, some holes I "inoculated" with healthy soil from the forest.  I gave them only a handful or so of mulch.  Mostly, STUN (Sheer Total Utter Neglect).  Like I said, jury is still out on numbers.

3. How did you get so many?

Check with your department of forestry.  Bare root is cheapest.  Picking up at the nursery site rather than shipping saved me coin.

4. What was your protocol for putting them in the ground?

My sequence of events for planting 1000 trees:

1) Thinking about goals, site plan, and suitable species to achieve goals.
2) Sharing goals with family and friends.
3) Fall prior: ordering trees; choosing planting days in early spring.  Welcoming family to participate.
4) Scavenging bamboo for making posts. I wish I spent more time seeking taller, stronger bamboo marking stakes!  Mine were only a couple feet tall or so and were less useful after the first year.
5) Using a makeshift measuring rod along with measuring tape to place bamboo stakes in approximate tree locations at even intervals according to site plan.
6) Used a 2-person gas auger to dig some pilot holes.  The auger was very heavy to carry.  At one point I had even tried carrying it around on my back...phew!  In retrospect, we probably didn't need to do full on auger holes, though I haven't compared the quality of hole with survival rate.
7) Days of, early morning: drive to pickup site, wait around a while for the gov't employees to assemble the correct order.  Quality spot check the order.  (I was a little disappointed in the maples which seemed premature, but oh well.) Drive to design site.
8.) PLANTING.

We (first myself, then mom and I, later the whole family) used a 'murican-made spade and a modification of the dibble bar method.  Also used some regular shovels and trowels when we had more people.

I carried the trees and supplies behind me in a cart.

I kept most of the trees in their bags and box until ready to plant, so that they wouldn't dry out in the sun.  Might've had some buckets for the trees with water in them, too, as well as yard bags for collecting mulch and rich soil from the forest.

I was wearing rubber boots for one of the days.  From an ergonomics perspective, I recall some foot pain by the end of the day, as the soles weren't particularly sturdy enough to protect my foot from pushing down against the spade all day long.   It was raining at some point too during one of the planting days, or had just rained, as there was plenty of mud and I recall worrying about whether the compressed clay soil would have enough oxygen and tilth after being worked while wet.

9) Experiencing joy whenever more family came to assist with planting!  
10) Patience.  

I read every word twice. Thank you for taking the time and energy to write out such a detailed response. I would follow up with one more question. You said the auger probably wasn't needed. Would you say that you could just use the dibble bar without pre augering holes? Can you pre-dig holes with a dibble bar?

You're very welcome.  

In my opinion, the auger was a waste of time, energy, and petrol on our design site.  Augering was not required, and the vast majority of our holes were just with spade or shovel.  Advanced digging with the spade or shovel was not required.  

But we didn't know that at first, because we had never seen the trees to know what they would look like or feel like, structurally speaking.  Leading up to it, my feeling was "how will I be able to dig and prepare so many holes?  How can I front load the work?"  

But really, the digging and planting can happen at the same time with maybe about 30 seconds per tree if there are two people doing it.  One digs, the other inserts the tree.  That said we may have given the fruit trees a little more "normal" holes and pampering time, to try to spread the roots out nicely.

Btw, one could fit thousands and thousands of these bareroot trees in a sedan if desired!  Our bareroot trees' roots' lengths were generally 1 to 2 times the length of the stem, so a nice long spade was generally deep enough for planting via the dibble method, the exception being the black walnut.  

The walnut required more of a standard hole than the dibble method.  Being 2yo, it was more rigid and had structurally 3Dshaped roots rather than roots that could be flattened, so a dibble bar method would have collapsed the roots into a fan-shape and possibly damaged them.  Rather than do this, a trowel was used to fill in the spaces around the roots to prevent air pockets in the dug hole.  So much more time is needed digging a $4 hole for a ~$1.75 tree, than a 25¢ hole for a ~30¢ tree.

For anyone who didn't see the dibble bar diagram on that link, here's a description...

Our soil was friable enough such that a spade could be easily inserted into the dirt, and wedged open to create a narrow V-shape in the dirt.  This opening was wide enough and deep enough for a tree's roots to be dropped in.  The spade is then lifted from the dirt, and reinserted into the soil a little further away from the planting spot, but at an angle relative to vertical this time.  The spade is levered towards the tree to laterally push the dirt to ensure soil contact with the roots.  This results in a flat root "fan" shape underground.  Very rapid process!

Edit:  

Can you pre-dig holes with a dibble bar?

You could probably get the initial V-shaped wedge done, but I don't know how much time it would save from an overall time-motion perspective. Additionally, a simple spade works instead of purchasing a new dibble bar.

Great job planting 1,000 trees! Thank you for sharing this post.
Rather than buying bare root seedlings from nurseys etc. why no collect and / or purchase tree seeds at a fraction of the cost? You can plant the trees seeds in protected pots (birds, mice and other rodents) in the fall (leaving them outside so they will stratify - go through a cold season) and transplant the new baby trees that germinated onto your orchard or other preferred location in the spring (or fall) of that year?

Good questions.  For my situation:
1. Lack of known, trustworthy seed suppliers for the species I wanted.  (These trees have genetics appropriate for the area.)
2. Unknown germination rates.  
3. Less survivable and competitive compared to transplants.
4. Harder to find a seed in the ground to re-visit amongst weeds and competing surrounding growth compared to a sturdy whip.
5. Would've set me back 1-2 years in growth -- bare roots were planted as 1yo -2 yo.
6. Transplanting seeds from pots:
- Would require 1000 pots.
- Would require appropriate soil for the pots.
- Would require extra labor in monitoring, irrigation, removal and planting out.  

So time is the biggest factor.  

What is my time worth to me?  What is my family's time worth?  It took:
- Very little time to research and order what I wanted.
- Only a little time to pick up the trees.
- Only a couple days to plant them.
- A couple more hours here and there for spot mulching favorites, minor irrigation the first summer, and herbivore protection.

I'm shooting for STUN.  Give the trees the bare minimum, and learn what works for the next go around.  It is quite possible that hundreds will be dead the next time I do a head count.  That's ok. Trees are cheap, but time is priceless.

Now, my nephew and I did do a test planting of probably 200 mulberries and June berries (direct sown from foraged berries), but that is another day's story yet to be fully told.

Here's a quick one page progress report for our Black Locust trees on this temperate design site.  

The Black Locusts are 3.5 years old as of the date of this post.
I didn't count, but I'm still thinking high 90s for Black Locust % survival rate.