Planting 350 Tree Seedlings on my Back Acreage

On May 7th I got the news that I had been waiting for since February. It was time to pick up my 350 tree seedlings! I got the email on a Thursday night at 5:30 and immediately my heart plummeted. Their times for pickup were Mon-Fri 8:30-4:00 so I would have to get them early that very next morning or my little seedlings would be sitting in a box all weekend and I couldn’t let that happen! (Not that my awesome boss wouldn’t have let me leave work early I hate to do that because our Fridays are our crazy busy days.)

I ordered a white and red pine (norway) bundle of 250 trees and 100 bur oak trees off of their website.

The Minnesota state nursery where I picked up my seedlings was SO COOL! Its only about 20 miles from my house. I remember driving by there as a kid and wondering what kind of velociraptors they were raising because their fences are like fifteen feet tall. Nope. Not keeping anything in. They’re keeping everything out to keep the baby trees safe!

The hundreds of rows of seedlings was surreal. People carefully picking them, gently sorting them and packing them up.

There were literally DOZENS of boxes just like mine and dozens more being packed, literally thousands of trees ordered, paid for, and waiting to be planted!

(Minnesota grew, boxed and sold nearly 3.5 million trees this year!)

I had prepped the night before by charging four batteries for my two drills. For Xmas I had added what can only be described as a “baby auger” to my wish list for just this moment. My cousin got it for me and when I opened it she said, “I don’t even know what you do with that.”

I’m relieved to say it was a good idea.

It easily drilled every hole for me!

In my brain I broke up the acre of land I wanted to plant into three sections. The first two sections were my priority as I can actually see them from my house and yard. So, I packed my car and parked it in the middle of them. Also, of my 350 seedlings, I had only 100 oak so I wanted to make sure they got into my two priority sections. (The other 250 tree seedlings were half white pine and half norway pine.)

I think most of us tackle big jobs by breaking things down into smaller bites and that’s absolutely how my brain works. In this case I had my first highest priority section that would be getting 50 oak seedlings and 50 pine seedlings.

The first section would also determine for me if I had enough seedlings to plant the whole acre or if my lowest priority section would be getting planted next year.

I headed out with my drill and one bunch of 100 flags

(I spent $40 on those flags but I’m very glad I did. They came in bunches of 100 so I knew exactly how many trees I had planted and, obviously, they marked all of my trees for me too.)

It made sense to go all the way along the edge and then just work my way back. Drilling a hole. Sticking a flag beside it. And so on. I kept checking myself to try to keep around eight feet between holes which was about seven steps for me.

(Note: yeah, most people plant seedlings (especially pines) within only a couple of feet of each other because they know they’re going to lose a lot of them. But I don’t want to thin my trees out later and I have every intention of replacing them if they don’t make it every year and I can always just plant more – this is my first time!)

I had 200 holes “dug” with flags beside them in my two priority sections in about an hour and a half.

Oh if I could have cloned myself for this!

A person coming in behind me planting and watering as I drilled the holes would have cut my time in half. Yes, I could have dug the hole, stuck the flag, planted the tree and watered the tree all at the same time but that felt like drudgery.

Drilling my holes first meant I never had to set my drill down. It cost me twice as many steps but it was also fast, easy and efficient which gave me a much needed confidence boost because this task really daunted me. Also, being able to walk about as I just made holes gave me a much better idea of coverage, where I actually wanted each tree and the spacing between them.

With my holes ready in my first two sections I grabbed my yard cart. In it I had a ten gallon drum which I filled with water and all 100 of my oak seedlings and 50 white pine and 50 norway pine.

The trees came in bunches of 25.

No the yard cart did not go with me from hole to hole… I did a lot of circling back to it. I planted about a dozen seedlings at a time and then took a bucket to water all of them. I lined my property line with pine trees roughly doing every other one of the two different types.

The first day I tackled this was after work on a Friday so I didn’t get started until well after 5 but I still managed to get my two sections (200 trees) planted before dark. I was already a third of the way done planting and it wasn’t even the weekend yet!

AND MY GOSH DID I FEEL IT

That may have been the most labor intensive four hours of my life. About the last 40 trees I was quite annoyed with myself that I was pushing to plant so many as I had the whole weekend and my back was good and GONE. Not to mention my poor feet… But we had a chance for rain that night which we did get so I wanted to get as many in the ground as possible.

When I planted that first weekend in May over 8,000 acres had already burned in Minnesota around me. If I had known in February that it wasn’t going to rain I may very well have waited another year to do this… Hindsight.

The Bur Oak seedlings were MONSTERS. I had eight leftover at the end of that day that had massive roots that were going to require me to use a shovel for the first time in this process.

I collapsed that night and Saturday dawned cold and windy.

I hurt from the hair down.

Getting out of bed was a process.

I had to sit down to get dressed.

I had 150 trees to go.

My nephew text me and said he’d be over the next day (Sunday) to help and I’m not sure if I’ve ever loved anyone so much in a single moment lol I may have cried! I still forced myself to get up and finish planting my Oaks. I had those eight left and, though they were all I got planted with a trench shovel that day, it was enough to make every part of my body scream at me.

I wanted a long hot bath so bad but I feared I wouldn’t be able to get out of the tub!

Sunday was a much nicer day and my nephew and I headed out to the third (and last) section in the early afternoon. He took over my drilling and the two blisters on my hand thanked him.

He drilled the holes, I stuck the flags.

My third section is half a flat area and then a hill down around it to a low area on my property. (It used to be swampy but that was years ago.) In the center of the flat area I have a pile of brush, downed trees and logs that I had planned on burning.

I still didn’t know if I had enough trees left to plant the entire area so we planted around the brush pile. If I had had enough trees I would have just planted right up to it and forgot about it as everything I’m planting I now consider: THE WILDERNESS.

We didn’t have enough trees though so there is a bonfire in my future and, also, more trees to plant over it next year despite my entire body protesting that fact. I actually ended up with 368 seedlings all together! (I know this because of how many flags I had left.)

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago,

the next best time is right now.

Besides the fact that planting trees is always a good idea (in my opinion) I’m going to really benefit from these guys over time. I know its going to be years but this empty field is north of my house and these trees are going to eventually give me a much needed wind break.

Also, I hate grass, the only reason this part of my property was ever mowed was entirely against my will. Lodi going out there and mowing down hundreds of wild milkweed plants one year still makes me so upset and angry I can’t let myself even think about it.

Giving it back to the wildlife from the dead ecosystem he wanted is pretty much the best thing I can think of to do… even if it takes 20 years.

Them showing up on a Friday was ideal as I had all weekend and I used all of it! The instructional pamphlet that comes with them states this in bold: A DRY SEEDLING IS A DEAD SEEDLING I kept my seedlings in water until I planted them and you only have a few days to get them in the ground once they are boxed.

Once everybody is established all of my trees can grow up to three feet a year so they can all easily be my height in just a few years – pretty cool!

Will I be doing this again? Yes, despite the protest of my poor feet and back, I will definitely be doing this again. No one warned me this was going to be so addicting…

The minimum order is 300 or a mixed bunch bundle of 250. Unfortunately none of their bundles are of a mixture of trees that I want as I just planted the mix bundle of white and red pines and won’t be doing that again.

My norways (red pines) have done awesome and shown just why everyone plants them, why they’re the state tree of MN and why I’m sick of them lol I have thousands of them on my property already. The white pine is my very favorite pine tree and I sadly lost upwards of 70% of them… big bummer. I just don’t have the soil for a tree that isn’t cool with being sandy and dry just about all of the time.

Which is why my bur oaks did really well, I only have maybe a loss of 20% of them which is spectacular.

They have many tree types available and I want them all but there is only one other tree that I dare plant here and its a hackberry. So my order next year will be 100 bur oaks and 200 hackberrys.

It probably won’t surprise anyone that the hackberry tree produces berries that birds and wildlife love so its pretty much my perfect tree and I didn’t even know it. And I also hadn’t even heard of it before now!

Considering I planted 150 more pines this year than oaks I never thought I would end up with more leaf trees but that’s how its looking and I’m very happy about it.

I’ve set a reminder on my phone at 12:01am on October 1st when ordering opens as I really want those hackberrys and they sell out quickly.

Google really needs to update their satellite pictures. My garden and pond is where the barn used to be. The outline is everywhere I planted all of my little guys and I am so stoked, I got almost the entire acre covered!