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My virtual community, The WeLL will
celebrate
its 25th anniversary this year. Off the top of my head, I suggested that
we plant trees to commemorate the event. My first thought was to plant
street trees in the Bay area, but before I even finished my post I
realized that it could be anywhere. People could plant urban street
trees, or trees in their own yards, or even do some guerilla landscaping
by planting a tree or two in a nearby park or brownfield.
Not that I'm suggesting anything illegal. Do check with your local authorities. I've never heard of anyone being arested for planting a tree, but as long as you're going to go through all the trouble, you might as well make sure you are doing it in a way that your city streets department won't undo. By way of example, here's New York City's rules on planting a street tree, even if it's in front of your own house. Most places aren't so strict, and if you call and say you want to plant a street tree they'll offer to send you a pamphlet on which trees do well in your town. If that. Anybody can plant a tree, but planting a tree and ensuring that it grows is a bit more difficult. It's the first year that counts the most, because if the tree doesn't have a good first year, it's not going to have other good years, if it has any other years at all. There are three main approaches to tree planting: traditional balled and burlapped (and container grown) large trees, bare root large trees, and bare root small trees. Which approach is most appropriate depends on the location and how you can care for the tree during that first critical year. Staking and guying new trees, from Kansas State University A watering system for street trees. Just take a look at it, and maybe you can come up with something similar at a much lower cost with some parts from the Home Depot. Tree watering bags . These work pretty well, and they have the added advantage of working with the patience of the typical American gardener. Again, you might be able to come up with something similar made from items commonly found around the home. More important than anything, though, is the old advice: Don't plant a fifty dollar tree in a ten dollar hole. In urban and suburban areas, the soil is usually compacted severely by the heavy equipment used during construction. So before you buy bales of peat moss, before you spend any money on fertilizer, before any of that, dig the hole WIDE. Not deep, but wide. That is the single most thing you can do ensure that your tree does well its new location Nurseries that sell large bare root trees are still uncommon, and you will probably have to buy half a dozen or so from someplace relatively local to make it work. But get a couple of neighbors to join in on the idea, and there you are. A friend of mine's mother who is now in her nineties planted a bunch of bare root trees on her father's farm as a little girl. She lived to see the farm sold to someone who bought it because he could use the large barn for shipbuilding, and he could harvest the now mature trees for masts. Isamu Noguchi brought the trees for the UNESCO building in Paris as a small bundle of bare root trees from Japan. Many mail-order nurseries sell bare root seedlings, the main thing to be careful of is making sure that they don't dry out before you plant them. Planting bare root seedlings is simple: Open a slit in the ground. Put the seedling in the gash. Stomp it back shut. I know, now I'm saying exactly the opposite of what I said above, about digging a huge hole and all that. But if you have room to plant a bundle of little seedlings, you probably don't have a site that had a lot of soil compaction. In this type of planting, the goal is to have the soil disturbed as little as possible, and the tree roots grow into it freely.
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