126/201 = 63%, + 400 more

Last year's trees emerge
from the snow - March 31

It's been a while since our last forestry update. Part of the reason is that the trees we planted last spring have been under snow for the last 5 months! Now that the snow has finally melted, we were able to take another inventory of how our seedlings are doing. The last update was almost exactly a year ago. (Wow, it was really a year ago?) We planted 201 in March of last year, and by late April we were down to 199/201.

Well, 1 year later our quick count pegged the survivors at 126. That's a 63% survival rate.

At first glance, that sounds really bad: more than a third of the trees we planted last year didn't survive. But this isn't like gardening or landscaping. After we had scalped the grass and plopped the trees into the ground, we just walked away and didn't see them again for a year. There was absolutely no wildlife protection, irrigation, or any other niceties. These little 2 year old seedlings had to make it all on their own. The biggest seedling dangers in our area are deer (trampling), gophers (eating), and competition from weeds and grass (starving). Since the majority of our tree deaths left no evidence behind other than bare patches of dirt, the obvious conclusion is that gophers were our biggest killer.

Still, 63% actually isn't that bad. We've talked to some people in the area who lost 80% of their trees in the first year. 63% survival sounds pretty good compared with 20%.

200 was just the beginning, though. In November we applied for and received a cost-share grant through the USDA Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). The grant covers various practices on our property, including thinning and pruning some of our existing stands, but the majority of the cost-share money is associated with planting out the remaining 12 acres of our meadow in Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir. The schedule that we agreed to has us planting 3600 trees (300/acre) over the next 4 years. Yes, that's a lot of trees.

Last fall we had ordered 400 trees from our local conservation district but were forced to keep them on ice while we waited for the long winter to finally end. Since the planting is now under a contract, we also were careful to follow the guidelines for each practice, particularly the 2ft radius specified for the hand scalped area around each tree. Last year our scalps were much smaller and we only planted 200, so the work went much faster and we were finished in only 2 weekends. This year, it's been over a month of weeknights and weekends, and it's only this week that we've finally finished the new plantings. Okay, so we didn't work in the field every night or all day every weekend, but it sure seemed like it. And yes, Corinne and Rocket were out there every time. Years from now we can say that Rocket helped (or perhaps hindered?) planting that section of forest.

We think about this planting as a long-term investment; it will likely be 40 years or more before these trees could be harvested. Most people have an IRA or 401k, but how many people have a FOREST? In exchange for some hard labor now, hopefully we'll have a lot of wood to sell in the future. (Anybody have wheat or ore to trade?)

This whole valley used to be a forest, so occasionally we think about the poor pioneer who cut down this section of the forest so that he could farm and feed his family. We're undoing all of his hard work! It's a cycle of life thing.

- Mike (& Corinne)