Tree Transplanting for use as future vine-posts

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Today, I went out to the Ambers’ farm and helped Cliff transplant about 12, year-old trees that he had started from seeds in his garden. We added them to three or four rows he had already put in on one side of their property. He’s growing them for their future use as fence posts for his vineyard (which is why we planted them in a polygon grid pattern). First, we dug holes for the trees with shovels. I learned the proper method of doing this by first removing the top layer of sod starting at the centre and going in a circle around it and then digging down a foot or so. We dug 12 holes lined up 14 feet? apart in rows that lined up in a zigzag pattern. A few holes were very rocky and difficult to dig. We even found the remains of what looked like a gravel road as well as a huge boulder in one of them. While we were digging, we also were collecting Japanese beetle and June bug grubs as we found them in the soil, which we’ll take to lab later. After digging the holes, Cliff dug up the saplings from the garden and we transported them in his green tractor bed keeping their roots covered with dirt (so they wouldn’t dry out). We then placed the treelings in the holes we had dug, covering them with the dirt, which was packed down on top of them to approximately ground level. Then we placed the sod back on top upside-down in a circle around the tree, which will eventually decompose and contribute nice rich organic matter to the growing trees. We ended up with five leftover saplings, which we placed in/near where the backyard woods meets their lawn in hopes that they’d grow there, since we’d already dug them up and didn’t want them to die. The weather was almost hot today! I got nice and dirty and sweaty, and now my back’s a little sore from all that shovelling, but it was nice to be outside on such a beautiful day.