I am hopeful, that the trees will adapt well. The biggest issue we are having right now is the rain. Now to be fair and honest, we are hundreds of hours behind where we wanted to be in site preparation. A family illness pulled me off of this for more than a month, trouble with my first loggers, and now rain. A vineyard owner who was out there with us yesterday, said he had never seen this level of rain. As EddieWalker had pointed out in a previous thread, you need to pack in the holes when you are filling a stump hole. Some of my holes packed in and held and some of them were too loose so when the rain fell, and flowed downhill, it filled those holes....now they are traps. I noticed that this is more profound toward the bottom of the slope, so much so that it is not possible to drive the tractor..it just sinks in and gets stuck. I even had to use the arm to pull the excavator out when I got stuck there yesterday. IF you dig a hole on the lower half of the hill, it fills with water within minutes. So I have less than half the area I thought I would for plantingMy solution may back fire, but I feel that it is all I really can do. I was told by the folks I bought the trees from that they can not be heeled in at this point, They must be planted. So I am going to plant about 4 rows at a very high density and come in and transplant them in the winter, or early next spring. I am hopeful that they can take the shock. I have 120 planted in the proper spacing but that leaves me with almost 250 trees and only about 3/4-1 acre of land that is cleared and workable.
Yesterday was sunny and things started to dry out, Rained just a tad last night but no accumulation. Some rain is expected again this week but less than half an inch. Hopefully it will dry enough in a week or two get the rest of the field smoothed back out. We were kicking debris to the side, sometimes, just to dig our holes. And in the end, it proved easier to use a shovel. With 6 people digging it wasn't too bad.
