the man who planted trees

A 30 minute video. 

This is on my top 10 list.  For all movies, books, whatever.

This is a great video.  Very inspiring!  I want to go plant trees everywhere now.  Luckily, I've already got 10 coming to me from arborday.com from my membership renewal!  I can't wait to get these into the ground now!  I wish I had more than 10 coming (though with my luck the ground will freeze by the time I get them with the crazy weather around here!

Good find!

-Jeremy

You can buy tree seed.  How much space do you have?

I have 3 acres... a blank canvas.

-Jeremy

Start with "lawyer nursery" ....

I'll check into them.  Thanks!

-Jeremy

Its a great story, unfortunately fiction but inspiring.

Nordic PmC are doing a 10,000 tree project  http://www.permaculture.org.uk/upload/docs/10000Trees.doc ; for their document.

I get a bit worried when people are talking about planting trees when maybe its forests, orchards, woods etc we should be planting??


SteveR



www.permaculture.be

Fiction based on a true account. 

Forest  - isn't that what was accomplished in the vid?

Modern Johnny Appleseed. Thanks for the inspiration!

This is the story that inspired me to start learning about forest restoration, I'm glad it's getting around.  Does anyone know any good resources on tree propagation and planting for native tree species in the Cascadia region?

Anybody know of other perennial seed sources?

I plant at least a couple dozen new trees every year..this year there was more like 4 dozen that i put in..or more..and I have grown oak and apple trees from seeds to full grown and bearing nuts and fruit..as well as growing seedlings that i've gathered from the wild of evergreens and deciduous trees..of all kinds.

it takes a long time..but not as long as one would think..i've been doing it here for 38 years..my oak tree is 36..that I planted from an acorn
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and here is an apple tree from a core..about 20 years old
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there are hundreds of trees on our property besides..all from seedlings..or seeds.

Brenda,

What are the apples like from the tree where you planted the core?  What kind of apple was the core from?

couldn't tell you what the cores were from..as my father in law used to give us bushels of apples that they would glean from local orchards after they went through and harvested with their equipment..they would take bushels and make cider and keep the best for eating..and give us a couple bushels every year..so the bushels were mixed apples.

I figured out how the apple trees got into the fields too..my husband would take the apples that were beginning to spoil from those bushels back to our woods to feed the deer..and some would rot ..and now i have two beautiful baby apple trees in our woods and field..that we just noticed first time this year..(probalby cause we weren't walking in the woods in May the years before as they are fairly large)..

the one in the photograph has a medium size red apple with a lighter area on it..i'm thinking it is kinda like an old fashioned type apple..they have a very nice sweetness with a little bit of tart..and are not real firm..a good eating or sauce  apple..

the other two trees that we just found yesterday..don't know about those.

here is a photo of one that is growing out of the center of an alder bush on the backside of our pond..i just found this tree yesterday and i took a snapshot of it..we will cut down the alder and try to salvage the apple tree there..have plenty more alders where that one came from.
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don't have a photo of the other one i found deeper into the woods..as i didn't have a camera with me..it is about 300' back from our nut/berry orchard..i'll photograh it soon..unfortunately that one was surrounded by wild cherry trees that were full of army worms..tent worms..but i sprayed those suckers !! This apple tree looks like it is at last 10 to 15 years old..but obviously we hadn't gone back in this area when it was in bloom so we hadn't spotted it..it was absolutey full of blooms..just like the other two.

How is the taste of the apples from the apple core tree?

they are sweet with just a hint of a tang, they are not overly firm or tough but also not mushy soft..easy to bite into , they have a fairly thin skin with a bit of green color after mature but still mostly red..just a spot of green on them..

the blossoms have a spot of pink on them as you can see, but are mostly white.

the other two trees have more white to their blossoms..one has a blush of pink..i haven't had apples off the other two as I just found them..didn't get a chance to walk back and get a photo of the other tree in the woods today.

it has that thick gnarly old looking apple tree bark..where the one growing out of the alder has a smoother bark.

I will be watching for apples from these two new trees this year..as they should be ready about the same time as the one in the yard..blooming together that would be my guess.

i tell you right now the apple blossom smell around here will about blow you over with dozens of apple trees in full bloom !!! also the pear and cherry are finishing up their bloom period right now too..

Apples from seed ....  that is a very interesting thing ...

If only I had planted those apple seedlings I started when I was a kid. The person who bought my parents' house would be enjoying some mighty fine apples. I think I'll do that here this year. We may move in a few years, but the place would be for the better. I've been thinking of what tree to plant in the front yard. How big do apple trees get? I don't plan on orchard pruning it, just letting it grow natural.

normal size apple trees get about 20 x 20 when full grown..and are really difficult to spray if you need to spray..the tops anyway.

my largest "from seed" apple tree is about 20 to 26' tall by about 20' in diameter right now..it is about 15 years or so old..not sure ..It has born apples for probably all but 2 or 3 years..it grew very fast..it is at the end of our drainfield so it gets plenty of nutrients.

that is the one that is by the grey shed in the photo above..that shed is about 16' tall and  you can see it is a good8 to 10' taller than the shed..or more.

the other two apple trees are smaller..one is about 18 x 18 and the other is about 15 x about 10 across..

If you look in the Permaculture video list i posted (im amazed it has such low view counts) You will see a video called 50 Million trees and counting.  If your inspired by this video watch that video..

Peace

The first link appears to no longer work.  I found the video here:  http://www.viddler.com/explore/Ms_Valerie/videos/240/

I didn't plan on spraying. The only problems I've seen with trees around here are from man's interference. Nature takes care of things pretty well. I just need a compact tree for the front yard. I've been thinking cherry blossom or redbud. Those are both trees that are beautiful, compact, native or acclimatized, yet not common in my neighborhood. I may choose apple instead and have a productive tree. That'd definitely set my yard apart. 

make sure if you are setting out a tree that you want fruit on..and it is something no one else grows nearby..that you buy one that doesn't require a pollinator for fruiting..or you will have to put in two if they do.

Are apples heterosexual or hermaphroditic? I was thinking of having a second in either the rear or side yard.

you really should have at least one apple tree that blooms during the same time period..for best apple production.

most fruit trees do better with another of the same ..or if not you can always rob a bearing branch from a tree somewhere and put it in a bucket near your tree for cross pollination..that is the old fashioned way of doing it.

you can also graft a branch of another tree on your tree for the same purpose.

Sooo... I assume they're hermaphroditic. Each tree has male and female flowers?

SteveR, you say you are worried about people talking of planting, just trees, instead of forests.
      I don't have enough land to plant a forest and if i did i don't have enough money to buy a lot of trees all at once and no experience at borrowing money over and above tiny amounts by a mistake. Add to that the energy it takes to plant trees and take into consideration, when you consider the energy, that i have been more sucessfull with the trees i have planted after undoing their roots as they go round and round in the pot and tie themselves up in a basket of roots that, i have read, they can be unable to find a way out of, which can cause their death in two odd years. Another factor is the energy i have to water them in the hot season untill can manage on their own i can't handle too many trees at once. Most people don't have a don't have a month to plant in and just try to plant between cooking meals or working and such and yet we can do quite a lot, also if you just stay your hand and let things grow, wild trees just spring up.
    It is harder to start trees in bad soils, maybe not if you get the right tree and easier to start bettering soils with grass than trees, a book with a prelude by Hugh Hammond Bennett you can find him in google, says that it is quicker to build up soils with grass and clover annd such than with trees. There are other considerations in ecology like creating and maintaining humidity that tees maybe better at. I imagine that lots of humidity gets trapped under the canopy of treeson all days that are not windy. 
      Had i built berms and and canals and such permie culture instalations i mighthave found watering trees less of a problem. Lots different gardening books have given me an idea of organic gardening but the permiculture sculpting of gardens to help with the weather and water problemsthinking about how to place a pond so that it would cool or heat your land depending on what you needed is new for me as are the suceeding lines of  trees and then bushes and then low plants, bushes, trees,  of pern¡maculture and i do wonder hhaving lots of trees works with vegetables in countries with less sunshine. I would have thought that you would have to have fewer trees if you wanted to grow things at their feet.  so as not to over shade the ground.
      There are lots of people who aren't in a position to plant forests. Maybe we can fill land that seems pretty abandoned with fruit stones and pips and things.  I post a foto of trees growing at the foot of a tree in Madrid there are poplars, chinese elms, and acacias, at the foot of this tree as far as i remember. These are all trees that sprung up in the spring of the year i took the photo, there are lots of trees in madrid and their seed gets everywhere. THey are doing pretty well eh. They disappeared later, herbicides i imagine, the earth had not been touched. agri rose macaskie.

I think the guy in the film did not plant trees - he planted tree seeds!  Cheaper and easier!

  Yeah,  he planted seeds i think, got to know the story when my children were young. Beautiful story.
  I've been looking up permacultura and seeing how they make channels with banks of organic matter beside them that work to let the water filter into your soil, making the desert grow trees, "permaculture in action greening the desert" Geoff Lawton, beautiful too by which i mean inspiring and hope creating.  The most understandable was rainwater harvesting by, permascience. I have looked at videos untill i have got a stiff neck. I have to look it up in google and see if the explainations there are more extensive.
  I shall put in another photo of baby trees, one of my projects was to increase recognition of baby trees. This time willows in a ditch in the country. agri rose macaskie.

Two young junipers this is the juniper oxycedrus. This is part of my recognise your baby trees and you will get a forest, photography project, which fits in with the ideals of the man who planted trees.

  I post a photo of a small oak of the type quercus faginea. Stay your hand and a forest will grow.

And you can see a tiny acorn just to the left.

  The acorns nice isn't it , thanks for the comment . I did not loook at this in big before i posted it, it seems the focus on the leaves of the young tree is horrible. the stones and such are nicely in focus. agri rose macaskie.

They play this film to every environmental type program at my school during one of the first lectures. It was very inspiring and probably one of the major motivators to how I got to where I am.

It is true but also it is true that a lot of information is necessary. I saw a child program on bogs and swamps maybe fifteen years ago and how swamps clean water and was none the wiser about the benefits of swamps after the program except that they were said to be good. I found out why years later, maybe last year. Mothers watch programs with kids and anyway there is always a way to make the explanation simple for the kid if you don't try to say everything in two words. If they don't understand the first time hearing about it once will probably help them to understand later whenthey hear about it again.
  It seems as if lots of people don't know about organic matter and how good it is for the soil, they think it does not matter, that  you can get by on chemical fertilisers or they seem to think that erosion does not matter they can just let the soil get blown away, they have stopped thinking about hte farm they are going to leave their son. This can all be taught in kids programs the gnomes are meant to be very worried about ecology aren't they? I think they could fit in a lot more fact than they do though its written for young children. I think parents normally talk of more complicated things to their children than programs like this do.
    In a way farmers are the biggest industrial criminals of all. Their exploitations take up so much more room than those of everyone else and we have not got over thinking they are sweet and natural. The use of pesticides and herbicides can mean the town is healthier than the country. Erosion that makes it impossible to grow plants where they used to in the long run and bare earth where carbon absorbing plants could grow, must be among the worse things for global warming.
  The ignorance about farming seems to be enormous and if it did not exist we would be so much better off and so would places like Haiti, knowledge filters through though you have to have a big body of dispersers. Haiti is a place in everyones mind at the moment.
      Modern farming also causes problems for the soil , if the food for feeding cattle is grown far from the barns full of cattle, then Sir Albert Howard's the law of return, you have to give back what you take out, basically poop ours and animals poop returns it and mountains of rotting clothes. I suppose Africa should use all the old clothes we deluge them in to better their soils. Cotton going back to the earth. Dust unto dust etc. becomes very hard to achieve when the cattle live far from their food source and so you get the poor thin hay Susan munroe said all the farmers grew there is no manure near by to fertililse and better the texture of the soils of the hay feilds. Somethings designed to make things simpler make everything more complicated. agri rose macaskie.

it is strange the story does not often seem to be in boook shops at least it is not amoung those they lay out as their most interestring books here some very good childrens boooks seem not to flourish. rose .

jeremiah bailey wrote:I've been thinking cherry blossom or redbud. Those are both trees that are beautiful, compact, native or acclimatized, yet not common in my neighborhood. I may choose apple instead and have a productive tree.

Western redbuds produce edible pods and/or dry beans. They're quite compact. If you let the pods mature and don't get around to harvesting them, they will remain on the tree for at least a year (though often with minor insect damage).

I loved this video and story Really inspired me as well.

To my surprise, when taking some local topsoil to put in pots and grow different plants, some of my pots grew plants I couldn't recognize, which later were (naturally..) seedlings growing from seeds that just lay dormant in the soil under the trees that grow near by (e.g. pine). Which is wonderful for an easy way of multiplying local trees that seed around well!

Don't even have to collect or wait for any seeds. Just go under mature trees and take some earth and put in a pot to sprout and grow and replant That's brilliant for me. I guess I'm just simple that way haha.


A few of these friendly helpers grew all happy

I like that photo a lot, rose.

Hey, Brenda said apples get 20x20 feet?
perhaps where you are from?

I know of apples that are at least 40 feet tall, probably taller and more like 60 feet across or more.

It seems like most apple trees that have remained in my memory are quite a bit larger than 20 feet, usually more like 30.

Although there is a huge variety of size when it comes to apples.