Boy am I tired! My wife and I (bless her heart) planted a ton of trees this weekend. I got them from the Indiana State DNR nursery tree sale....We planted 100 white pines, 100 Norway spruce, 50 pin oaks, 25 Canadian Hemlocks, and 25 persimmons......wow what a lot of work, BUT I am super excited about the results, in a few years it is going to completely transform the property.....And it didnt cost as much as I thought....at the yearly sale the DNR gets rid of excess seedlings DIRT cheap....I paid 35 cents a piece for 18-24" seedlings. I plan on getting more next year.....I think tree plantings are overlooked by a lot of deer managers because of the long time it takes for them to make a diference.....but if you are thinking long term (and ideally we all should be) a property that has minimal cover or browse can be completely changed in 10 years into a wildlife heaven...I have a neighbor that has been doing this for 30 years; he has transformed bare farm ground into huntable woods in 30 years....it really is amazing. I planted all of our trees on top of an old sand and gravel pit/ landfill, hopefully in ten years no one will ever guess.
Very cool! What did you use to plant them? We have a few fields on our property that border roads. We have 1800 scotch pines and 600 white spruce on order that we're planting this spring as a border on two of the fields and do the other one next year. We'll get 8 rows out of them, so in a few years it will make a great block. We did the same thing back in 1991 and not a lot of the trees we could put stands in. Luckily, we have a planter that pulls behind a tractor. Hopefully it goes smoothly.
I am not a fan of planting in rows...We used a tree dibbler....its basicly a solid steel rod with a t-handle on top and a sharp triangular wedge on the bottom.....you push it down into the dirt and then pull it towards you...it creates a crevice you can drop a seedling in. when you pull it back out it closes the ground back up around the tree. If i had planted in rows, i would have used a gas powered auger...I just didnt want to tote one of those all over the farm....we planted the trees in a totally random pattern in the areas that we wanted.
Yep, I've used one of them before. For what you're doing, not planting in rows makes sense. Hopefully they take off!
Hope you have better luck than I did. Planted 600 cedar trees from DNR 2 years ago by hand. Maybe 30 survived the last two crazy years.
Seedlings? doesnt seem like it would be that bad to plan em. Me and my dad planted over 100 white pine and all sorts of spruce. These were 4 foot trees, it was tough but in the long run it will be worth it. I also plan on planting some oak this year ( 30 or so)
My boyfriend and I planted 1000 trees from the WI DNR last year up on our hunting land. It was brutal! It was cold and rainy and we were covered in ticks. I enjoyed the first maybe 300...but I didn't care if I saw another tree by the end of the day. This year we are only doing 500 and will have help, so it won't be so bad. But, most of our trees are nice and green and looking good...so far!
Good luck with the trees, I hope the deer don't eat too many of them. They seem to love everything I try to plant on my property. Maybe with 300 of them you will get a good number of survivors.
