Planting Little Pine Trees the Easy Way©

By: Arlene Wright Correll

When we lived up in our mountain house in Northern New York on the Canadian border it did not take long for us and our neighbors to find ourselves suddenly inside of what was called the "Blue Line". This was the edge of the Adirondack Park that kept creeping across a certain area of the North Country and edging its way into St. Lawrence County.

We and our neighbors all lived on 5 acres or more and most of it was woods. We lived on 22.5 acres and our next door neighbors to the left of us were summer folks on about 30 acres whereby our neighbor to the right was a city lawyer who decided to move full time to our area and had built a beautiful home on about 5 acres.

As most people do when they come from the city they decide they are going to do all the things that they think us country folk do and one year this neighbor decided he was going to get 1000 twelve inch pine trees from the local agricultural department and plant them.

They arrived, all one thousand of them, plus some extras they always throw in and he and his wife started to plant them on one fine sunny weekend. Now that is a lot of trees to plant before some of them start to kick off. They worked like crazy and a few days later he showed up on our door step with about 200 of them asking if we wanted them. They still looked pretty good so we graciously accepted them and then had to think how we were going to fit this planting project into our all ready busy schedule and where we were going to put them since we were all ready surrounded by a lot of woods.

We finally decided on a fairly cleared out spot and on the next Saturday morning we, our planting army of 6, me and 4 of our 5 kids marched out to do battle with these trees. I had read of a method about doing this type of thing in a swift and reliable way.

Here is the method.

1. Stake a peg with a long string in the ground and march about 100 ft down and stake the other peg into the ground.

2. Walk along this line and the first person takes an axe and swings a single chop into the ground next to the line and gives his axe a twist to the right as he removes it thus living about a 5 inch slit in the earth. That person then walks down about 6 feet and does the same thing moving quickly down the line.

3. The next person comes along with a water bucket that holds water that the little pine seedling trees has been sitting in for at least 24 hours, our had been sitting in the water for 3 days. That person inserts one little tree into the slit and then walks down about 3 feet and does the same thing moving quickly down the line.

4. The next person comes along and pushes the dirt of the slit with his or her shoe or boot closing all the air holes up around the tree. That person then walks down about 3 feet and does the same thing moving quickly down the line.

5. The next person has another bucket of water and pours some on the planted tree and again stomps down the ground. We made sure this person wore boots. That person then walks down about 3 feet and does the same thing moving quickly down the line.

6. Repeat process until you get to the end of the line and start all over again with a second row that is now placed at least 6 feet away from the first line.

We did this until all two hundred of the little trees were planted. Some we could not even see because in some places there were weeds bigger than the trees. However, we had nothing invested in this experiment except our time.

As most things go we all eventually forgot about them as those little trees did or did not do their growing thing until it seemed that one day we looked out upon a forest of trees that were about 4 or 5 feet high. We were amazed that the system worked.

Five years later we sold the mountain house and did not manage to get back to it until about 8 or 9 years later to visit our friends who had bought it from us. The trees were not about 20 feet tall and still standing.

In 2002 we were now living in Kentucky when we received 100 pine seedlings from the county extension office. I hired two of our grandchildren and off we went to do the same method of planting to these little seedlings in an area that I jokingly called "The Forest" because I always had the mower man avoid a patch of cedar trees everyone for years had been mowing down with a bush hog.

We three planted our rows of pine seedlings that day as I recounted how their father and his brothers and sisters had planted the trees in at the mountain house when they were just about their age. We got the job done and today, six years later, those trees are about 4 to 6 feet high and we have enlarge "The Forest".


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