Planting another 300 trees

[Tororider]

Well we are getting another 300 trees this weekend, 200 blue spruce and 100 fraser firs. This will add to the 700 trees we planted last spring, 450 norway spruce, 150 black hills spruce , and 100 fraser firs. Last year the black hills and frasers were small, in the 5-8" range while the norways were bigger 16-20". This year all the trees are supposed to be 16-24". We had to clear out part of a brush line in order to put the trees where we want them. It will be on the north side of the property and finish out the front privacy(in 15 years) border on the front side of our property.

Once the trees we plant on the north grow up a bit, we will take down the rest of the brush line and plant another couple rows of trees where they were.

A couple days ago my dad and I thinned out the brush line, we were just cleaning it out and dumping the stuff in a chip pile and a compost pile when we started moving rocks. We decided to move an old section of farm fence, rocks cemented together. I was trying to pull it into the bucket when my dad moved the tractor and sure enough my finger got smashed. Equal blame, I shouldn't have put my hand there, and my dad shouldn't have moved the bucket with me there. Fortunately I don't think it is broken, just a huge blood blister and swollen, and ugly. As long as it doesn't swell up too much more I should be ok. I feel pretty lucky that it isn't worse.

Anyways, I will try to post some pics of what we have gotten done so far and then of the progress this weekend. Haven't decided if we are going to use a post hole digger or a manual tree spud, any suggestions? We used a three point transplanter from the county last year and it didn't work out well. It wasn't set up correctly so we are going to avoid that this year. I think we may test out some holes with the phd and see how it goes, but for only 300 trees we are just going to go with whatever is easier.

 

[tony123]

Sorry to hear about your finger....ouch. Sounds like you are fortunate though. Three years ago I had a tablesaw accident, and wasn't as lucky.

Are those neighboring homes yours? or is there no home on your property?

My guess is that the PHD would be pretty good at what you're doing. You'd really only scratch the surface. If you wanted to improve your survival rate, I would think a 9" auger about a foot deep and then fill with a quality soil. Essentially giving the trees a "pot" type environment for the first year or two.

My associate always says, "put a $5 plant in a $10 hole instead of the other way around".

 

[Tororider]

Yeah very happy with the way things turned out, well not happy, but thankful, it definitely could have been worse.

Homes are neighbors. Its hard to tell but in the second pic the house is actually across the street. The only building on our property is our pole barn.

We are going to do some test holes to see how long it will take us between holes. With 300 trees to plant if it takes a couple of minutes for each hole with 300 holes it adds up. What is that, 10 hours at 2 minutes a hole? We will have to compare times with the manual spud, but I agree if we can get a good hole for the trees they will have a better chance.

 

[Ridgewalker]

I just planted 75 seedlings using my PHD. A pal came along behind planting as I drilled. We had the seedlings soaking in a root stimulator mixed up in a 5 gal. bucket. It took us 3 hours to do all 75 that way. That was about 3 weeks ago, I checked on them last weekend and only saw 1 for sure that was dead, the rest look good.

 

[Tororider]

I think we were going to use root stimulator again this year, thanks for the reminder. We will have to see, we want to get it done in a timely manner, last year we got all 700 trees planted in about 9 hours, so it was fast up front, but the repair on the backend made up for it. I will keep it updated.

 

[ToadHill]

Give some consideration to using a gel along with the root stimulator. It will swell up and hold water in the root zone, if I remember correctly it will increase it's weight by 40x and really help if you have any drought conditions.

Just dip the roots into the gel before you plant.

 

[Tororider]

Would I be able to find that a larger nurseries or would it be available even at a big box store? That sounds like a great idea. Thanks ToadHill

 

[EddieWalker]

Toro,

Sounds like you and your dad are working hard and getting allot done!!! When my parents are here, we do allot of stuff together too. One thing that I never do is trust my dad when he's on the tractor. I don't think he realizes how many close calls that he has. It's always a suprise to him, which tells me that he has no memory of his last oops.

Eddie

 

[Z-Michigan]

Wow, you're very ambitious. We planted about 100 trees last year with a crew of 9 people total, friends and relatives. That took maybe 3-4 hours and we were all exhausted. Not to mention some of the friends didn't do a great job. Unfortunately with the drought and a deer problem, I would say only 20 or fewer trees of that batch made it. We planted some additional trees from the same purchase in a "tree nursery" by our garden, close to the house, and about 95% of those trees made it.

What was your source for the trees? County tree sale? We bought our trees there last year. Tiny little things! We bought 50 red pine this year, supposedly they are more deer resistant than the white pine deer candy. The red pine all went in the tree nursery to grow bigger before transplanting in probably 2-3 years.

I will tell you what not to do - don't run a scarifier or chisel plow through planting areas beforehand, thinking loose soil will make it easier. It made little difference, probably created air pockets, and left the ground so rough that we can't mow around the trees - big problem. If I were doing up to 100 or so trees I would simply dig with a shovel, or consider the PHD you're looking at. Above 100 trees I might consider scarifier followed by disk, but it's easy to compact the soil below 3-4" with a disk and that's no good.

 

[Tororider]

Eddie,
My dad is only 56 so he hasn't gotten bad, hehe. It really was just a set of unfortunate actions by both of us. I am just glad that it didn't turn out worse. I will make sure that next time I tell him what I am going to do so he stops for sure to eliminate any chance of problem.

Z,
Yeah we were able to get the 700 done last year with just my dad and I for most of the day, and my brother joined in for a few hours. We have a 325 gallon water tank that sits nicely in the back of our F250, so we were able to water them a couple weeks, and when I say we, it was mostly my dad. He and I, mostly he, also spent a lot of time stepping down the trees to make sure that we got all the air pockets out. With all of that we were able to get most of the trees to live. I would say the Norway Spruces, the bigger of the trees, we probably had 95% survival, and probably the same with the black hills spruce. The fraser firs for whatever reason didn't do as well. Hopefully the larger trees will do better this next winter.

I didn't get a chance to talk to my dad tonight, but he was going to try a dry run with the phd and see how long it took for each hole. The nice thing with the phd, and thing that makes me think we should use it, is that we can pre dig the holes and use some of the nice topsoil we scraped off our drive to plant them. Time will tell.