Future Forest
We've had large tree plantings three times in various areas of our property or my late father's. One was on one acre at the lower end of a field, near bridge and a bend in the creek. Two years in a row our neighbor planted corn there and had that one part wiped out by the creek deciding to come up and over the road and field. Planting it is trees that don't mind a bit of wet in (I think) 2013 has yielded this:
They have had 12 growing season, now, and are starting to look like a little forest instead of a bunch of lined-up sticks.
The 2020 planting got very weird. Planting was arranged in the fall of 2019, but when 2020 rolled around . . well. Planting starts in the far south, and the crews work their way north just ahead of the spring weather planting bare-root seedlings. By the time they got to Maryland, lockdown happened and they weren't allowed to go any further north. My husband called everybody and their dog trying to find places to plant thousands of extra trees that had been headed for Pennsylvania and New York state.
We had been scheduled for 6 acres of planting to 'retire' pastures my father wasn't using any more. I don't know HOW much we ended up with, but it was a lot.
That hill in the middle left of the picture is planted on all sides; probably a couple thousand trees. It'll be interesting to see how this all changes over the next twenty years.
The 2020 crew was folks from Jamaica. Most or all of them were fully deaf or hard of hearing. I guess they grouped them together so they could have one sign-language translator for the whole group. At one point, my 80-yr-old, white-bearded father put on a suit jacket (with his jeans)(?) and went up to see how they were doing. From their point of view, an elder came walking across the field, nodded to them, and then disappeared into the forest and was not seen again. They thought he was an appalachian spirit of some sort.
You just never know.
