Today I planted trees.
It wasn’t Earth Day. (See here and here.)
I plant trees, because I like trees. No ribbons were cut. No speeches made. No t-shirts sold. No petitions signed. I didn’t “raise awareness”, pose for a camera, or notify the press. I planted them by myself. I wasn’t in a park. I used a shovel.
This time it was only a couple dozen oak trees. A few might be ready for firewood sometime around my 100th birthday. Ideally a few luck ones will live until roughly the year 2414.
I hope the squirrels appreciate me and the deer don’t eat ’em before they get a chance to grow.
The greenies sure are fond of planting trees as part of a ceremony. Given their record I’ve always kind of assumed that said trees would prove to be planted in the wrong kind of soil, or in too much shade, or where there wasn’t enough water to sustain them. Or they would be an invasive alien species, or poison sumac.
Maybe that comes from considering trees to be ceremonial artifacts instead of a plant.
I planted a couple more trees this year. I planted a Bur Oak. I’ve been trying to get one of those going for about 10 years now. I start them, and something happens to them before I get them planted. I got one started from an acorn last year, and planted it this spring.
Naturally, the first thing that my dog did was to run slap over it and strip every leaf off of it in the process. I said bad words, and decided that it was not my fate to have one of those. But it’s come back nicely, and the dog will now have to run over six big old stakes that I planted around it.
I also planted another Sawtooth Oak. Like you, I don’t care about the whole ecology thing, but I do want more shade in the summer, and a good Oak tree does that part quite nicely. I’ll take that, and the carbon sequestration be damned.
I’ve got an Oak tree in the front yard. We planted an acorn two years ago. My grand kids will probably get to see it as a tree. Some things are worth the wait.
I managed to get two more Pecans in the ground last week. They didn’t appreciate the +25mph wind gusts or the leafburn – but there’s new growth on them. Still have a dozen and a half fruit and nut saplings to get in the ground – hopefully this year…
The only non-edible trees I’ve started were a couple Osage Orange (not very common in this area). I’d like to hope that in another thirty years some woodworker will come along and recognise them and find them useful.
I planted about 1500 Doug Firs a while back. Not personally of course, we hired some hippies, Hoedad types, to do the work. In town I also planted a Giant Sequoia on our 100×100 lot as a joke. It is now a public nuisance. The Deodar Cedar I planted there got pretty big too. We’ve planted plenty of fruit trees, but we never had much luck getting nuts to grow. The squirrels have planted a lot of the neighbor’s walnuts around though, so at least some of them will do fine if they can get any light (a lot of tall firs and cedars around here).