The Birds!

My weak excuse is that I'm bad at math. How else to explain how I ended up ordering 750 saplings?

I just couldn't help myself last fall while ordering from Texas Forest Service web site. Prices are just $2 or so for an 18-inch to three-foot tree sapling, but they only sell them in lots of 25 or 50. How's a plant-loving girl to choose? White oaks hold their dead leaves until spring, much to avian delight in cold weather. Poplars, sweet flowers for my enjoyment and seeds for the birds. Swamp chestnut oaks grow even in flooded areas. Catalpas, beautiful large leaves, lush flowers with long beans for wildlife. Bur oaks, so large and mighty. Bald cypress, a rare conifer that likes black gumbo soil. The trees are dug up at the TFS nursery and shipped bare root in February, when plants are most dormant and least traumatized by such a move.

Those hardwoods were ordered before I stumbled upon a flier at the local ag office extolling a sapling assortment of oak, mulberry and flameleaf sumac trees that deer love to browse. Then I discovered the quail pack. If you plant them, quail will come, the flier said. Sold in bundles of four types of trees, if planted as prescribed around the edge of a field, both food and habitat is provided. In the back row, sand cherries grow up eight or more feet while sending up multiple trunks, making a solid line of protection. Next, a line of sand plums grows tall, but sends up just one trunk per tree, followed by a row of aromatic sumac that makes a thicket of moderate height. Between the cherry and sumac, an open but protected loafing area for quail is created, because that's what quail do there, they loaf around when not feeding. A bird can't work all the time! Lastly is nanking cherry, a shrubby sort of tree that flops on the ground, creating a low sheltered edge for quail to access the open field. Voila!

Scooter and I were dazzled by the possibility of how the quail pack could transform the North Meadow, now open to the road and not frequented much by wildlife. Plans were to do a prescribed burn of the meadow in February, removing the old Bermuda grass cover in preparation for disking and reseeding with native grasses. We'd disk right after the burn and then plant the trees. So we bought enough saplings to ring a six-acre field.

Great plan, one flaw. The burn never happened. All February, it was either too windy or too wet. March looked to be no different. Plan #2: We'll dig long narrow trenches and temporarily plant the saplings until we're ready to go. Then we heard from Dustin. A few years ago, his TFS saplings arrived at an inconvenient time so he trenched them in. A big bear of a man, getting them back out from the clay gumbo soil took several days, he said, and "bout liked to kill me."

On to Plan #3. Pot up the saplings. This decision was made easier by the condition of the saplings when they arrived. Although the fruiting trees were in vibrant good health, the oaks and other hardwoods were down right teeny. There was no way theyxd survive out in a field. We had large piles of topsoil and compost to make potting soil with, but no pots to put it in. Luckily, the local radio station has a call-in program for selling or swapping goods. Not expecting much, I put out an appeal for five-gallon pots. I'll be darned if I don't get a call from an old man named Aubrey who'd retired from the tree raising business due to his health. He had a few thousand pots that were just taking up space. And he was just three miles away!

Happily in possession of two truckloads of five-gallon pots, now the real work began. Enriched potting soil to fill each of those five-gallon containers had to be made from scratch by mixing topsoil with some compost, organic fertilizer and lava sand to help retain water, plus microbes to help the saplings take root. Our large galvanized tub could make up enough for about five pots at a time. I plopped the tub down between the topsoil and compost piles and shoveled, mixed and stirred, shoveled, mixed and stirred. I filled up pot after pot while the piles got smaller and smaller. As the pots got filled and planted with one or more saplings, I stashed them away nearby wherever I could find a flat level space. Pots accumulated, the piles diminished, until some 200 hours of manual labor later, all 750 saplings were planted in 500 pots. And I had the backache of a lifetime.

Now that we had 500 pots of baby trees, what to do with them until the fall when they are to be planted? We needed to congregate them someplace where we could water easily and keep the bugs at bay. Scooter devised a plan for a tree farm. We'd mark off a 40 by 40 foot plot of ground behind the barn where our garden hoses could still reach, eradicate the grass cover, lay down a heavy layer of mulch, and put the pots on top. Then we'd develop a drip irrigation system for it and possibly put up a light shade cover.

Easier said than done. It took several passes of Roundup to kill the grass cover, and two spreadings of corn gluten meal to prevent re-sprouting of seeds. Even so, the johnson grass and buffalo burr mostly just scoffed at our efforts. Prior to this, a series of rains left our grass particularly lush. The neighbors' entire herd of 30+ cows invaded our property, leaving the damp soil of our little tree-farm plot (and everywhere else) with the deeply pocked texture of a waffle. Just walking across the plot was a hassle.

The mulch was a whole involved affair. Hundreds of three to six foot tall cedar trees had grown up in the woods surrounding the South Meadow and all through the creek-bottom forest, threatening to overtake the good hardwoods. So we had the bright idea that wexd rent a tree chipper and make our own mulch while disposing of the much loathed weed cedars. Since this is a lot for two middle-aged amateurs to do, we enlisted the hired help of our neighbor Zane and his pal Craig, big strapping fellas in their 20s.

We went on a two-week cedar-destruction bender. We cut cedars all morning and afternoon long, day after day. We made up songs extolling our cedar-destroying prowess. We called ourselves the cedar sharks. As pacifists, we were drunk with desire to wreck havoc in the woodlands for a good cause. We piled the cedars on a flatbed trailer and schlepped them back to the barn. A huge pile arose, as large as a moving van. That wasn't enough. I wanted more, I wanted the world's largest cedar mulch pile so that I could have enough left over to mulch every garden bed my heart desired. We returned to the woods and cut until we doubled what we had. By this time, when we looked out the window of our RV, we could see nothing but piled-up dead cedars.

Obtaining the chipper was a whole rigamarole. It had to be rented from Sherman, a 45-minute drive away. After reserving it at one place twice, only to have it rented out from under us twice, we switched to another rental facility. We could only afford eight hours of time on it, which added up to one loooong day of work in 80-degree heat. Just learning to work the darn thing took two hours. But Zane and Craig persevered. As the mega cedar pile diminished, the mulch pile grew -- very slowly. One five-foot cedar seemed to make about a quart of mulch. Damn! At this rate, we'd barely have enough to cover the tree farm plot.

Back to the woods for Scooter and I, an emergency search and destroy mission for more weed cedars. We cut and hauled and cut and hauled while the fellas shoved tree after tree through the chipper. By sunset, we had two respectable piles of aromatic mulch. The smell of cedar was everywhere. However, when we added up the chipper rental and gas, wages for the farm hands and repair bills for the chain saws we destroyed in the process, it would have been cheaper to buy the mulch! We could have just burned the cedars and had one heckuva party!

After giving ourselves a couple of days to recover, we spread out one pile over the tree farm plot and moved all 500 pots into nice neat rows on top the mulch. We waited as spring arrived. The fruit trees, sumacs and mulberries sprouted green leaves with delirious abandon, poplars and catalpas rallied right behind them. But most of the bald cypress and four types of oaks remained pitiful sticks. I lavished them with organic get-up-and-grow juice of liquid kelp, humate, fish meal and molasses, special transplant rooting solutions, prayer and chanting, every trick I could think of. Nothing. One-fifth of our trees, dead in the pots.

As the summer temperatures soared, we realized that black pots on top of hot mulch were going to absorb too much heat and bake the saplings. Ed and Emory from the Radical Faeries of North Texas came out and helped me move the pots aside, scrape away the mulch down to the cool bare dirt, and nestle the pots back on top of it, piling mulch around them so the sunlight wouldn't reach. On the upside, instead of building a shade cover, a real doozie of an expensive construction project, Greg Rohde of Rohde's Nursery tipped us off to spraying the saplings with a liquefied white clay. It dries to create a protective covering that blocks sunlight and repels grasshoppers -- a two-in-one solution for $5 worth of clay. We love Greg!

All in all, the tree farm fiasco took an entire month from our lives, a month we had never planned on losing. And that doesn't include installation of a drip-irrigation system, which will no doubt entail a whole lot of time, challenges and surprises. Since it has done nothing but rain since we finished the tree farm, at least we don't have to hurry about it. But installing the irrigation better not involve moving all 500 pots a third time!