Remember the interns?
Today we worked with private contractors hired by the City of Seattle to help finish the slope we started with EarthCorps. We committed our entire day to planting. All in all we got 81 plants and trees in the ground: 25 hazelnut, 8 Oregon ash, 15 salal, 6 Douglas fir, 4 vine maple, 6 lady ferns, 2 goats’ beard, 2 Indian plum, 1 Oregon crabapple, 1 red elderberry, 1 lodgepole pine, 1 red currant, 1 bigleaf maple, 2 quaking aspen, 2 white snowberry, 2 sitka spruce, and 2 western red cedars.
It is important that we make sure our plants are put the ground correctly. To check ourselves we look for these things: make sure that the root crown was above ground (that’s where gas exchange occurs), perform ‘tug testing’ (making sure the plant is snugly in the ground), check for air pockets in the soil by the roots, and make sure that the plants were at ground level. We always value quality over quantity because one well-planted tree produces more oxygen than 1,000 incorrectly planted trees. Then, of course, we each double-checked each other for mistakes.
