There’s a saying about planting a trees that sums up everything I’m about to say:
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Back in 2020 when lockdown started, several things happened at same time that all of a sudden made me realize importance of trees to our farm and the future.
One was the trifecta of three books my mom bought me for Christmas: The Overstory (fiction) by Richard Powers, The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge, and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben.
I was reading those books plus watching small farm documentaries during the evenings because lockdown here started in March and it was dark and I wasn’t going anywhere.
All of this stuff just combined in my head like an explosion one evening and I had this epiphany. “Oh my gosh. We need trees!” For food, for shade, for habitat, for all that’s good and wonderful!
But I started out that journey in the wrong way because I didn’t realize they needed to be native trees—not the food trees like apple, but all the others. So we started planting trees but not necessarily the right trees.
Plus I had to learn to recognize trees. We bought several Oregon Ash trees not realizing we already had a hundred volunteer seedlings that had popped up on our property in our wetland area. So that was a waste of time and money. Now I can spot an Oregon Ash from a mile away.
Then we also learned how hard it is to get trees to get established. We’ve probably planted 300 trees since winter 2020 and have had a failure rate of 50%.
Then we get back to the saying about planting trees under whose shade you will never sit.
We know we are doing this for the future, not for us.
The thing is, you plant these trees and it’s going to be decades before they are big. We’ve only planted two Oregon White Oak so far and we have four more little seedlings and we will buy more because it’s a very important tree, it’s a keystone plant according to Nature’s Best Hope.
But they grow very slowly and won’t make acorns for 30 years and there’s a good chance I won’t be here in 30 years. Not that I’m holding my breath for the acorns, because we aren’t planting oaks as a food source, but for habitat and ecosystem. But still, that’s slow growth.
And then there are the apple trees. Our apple trees are huge, but over a hundred years old and dying off. So we are planting new ones. And we’re not going to get apples right away. We have to wait and nurture.
Plus we have more learning to do. In four years, we’ve had little growth and a lot of deer damage. Turns out, we should have done something about the grass around the trees because that has impeded their growth. So we are figuring that out. We did some research about landscape fabric and as much as I don’t want to use plastics, it looks like that is what we will try. (The deer are another challenge altogether.)
We also have started on our cider orchard with six out of the 30 trees we will need planted. I need the other 24 trees bought and planted this year if I’m going to make cider in my lifetime! Not sure how I will make that happen…
And then there were my unrealistic expectations. When we planted Black Cottonwoods, some of the first native trees we planted in 2020, I had read they grow 45 feet in seven years. In my mind, that meant we’d have 45-foot-tall trees by 2027. Woohoo!!
Uh, no. Trees spend the first year focused on building roots, for one thing. There’s a saying: The first year they sleep, the next they creep, the third year they leap. OK, full disclosure, we’re not seeing any leaping. But they have started growing now and maybe seven years from now they will be 50 feet tall?
And some trees are hard to get established! We planted 10 red alders by the chicken coop because they are a fast-growing tree and we need both shade and predator protection there. I’ve heard alders called weed trees because they spring up in disturbed areas, so I thought they’d be easy to grow. Nope. Only one of the trees survived. (In another area we planted two and both are flourishing despite the cows reaching over the fence to take bites.)
Trees are not like something made in a factory. I can’t just order up a tree and someone makes it and it shows up on my doorstep. It has to grow from a seed, and that will take years and sometimes decades. I might have visions of going online and buying a 20-year-old tree for instant height. But that’s only a fantasy. The trees we buy we buy small.
You think, “Go plant a tree, save the world!” Nope, not at all. There’s a lot more to it than that. And it takes a lot of patience…a lot.
But then I guess as slow growing as they are and as old as they are by the time they get to their majestic height, trees are just all about the patience.
And the photo with this post? That’s a fence line planted with trees. There’s one big native crabapple that we are lucky to have, but everything else is either a planted native or a volunteer, all under 2 feet tall. You can’t see them unless you look hard, but they are there. And someday they will tower over someone’s head…but it won’t be mine.
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