Tree Planting and the Frogarazzi

The last two days have been tree planting days.  We bought 5 small blue oak seedlings and 3 even smaller grey pine seedlings at a Bay Area nursery last Saturday.  Our getting them all in the ground this quickly is moving at warp speed. 

Originally, the pond had no trees at all around it except for some small cottonwoods and willows on the dam and a single buckbrush on the far side.  The shoreline, mostly shale with very little topsoil,  bakes in the summer heat.  Over the years, we've gradually incorporated compost and planted pines, cedar, live and blue oaks, starting closest to the house and working down the road that leads to the upper pad.  For roughly every five plantings, four don't make it.  With that sort of success rate, I try not to get too attached to my baby trees.  Still... if we can keep a tree going through its first three years, it's usually a survivor.  Some of the trees are now 20 feet tall and their shade and leaf litter have transformed the areas around them -- where there was nothing but scraped rock, we now have a developing ecosystem complete with bugs, toads, birds, and squirrels.  This is a very slow process, but one of the most satisfying projects we've undertaken at Frogpond.

Last winter we planted three rather large blue oaks along the road by the pond in a section where there were no trees at all.  We worked hard all summer to keep them alive.  I planted native wildflowers around them and these grew tall and shaded the roots of the trees.  Nice when simple solutions work.

We bought the newest seedlings to fill in the bare areas between these three oaks.

So this is me going down to do some serious planting.  Note the fortifying glass of wine in my hand and the excited duck in the background -- no doubt yelling, "Drunkard!  Inebriate!" Nothing like getting lectured at by a duck. 

The trudge from the pond to the house is long, so I decided it would be a good idea to save time and bring down the whole bottle.  I wouldn't be mentioning this if said bottle wasn't in such a prominent position in the following pictures.  But there it is. 

 Actually planting the trees is relatively easy -- it's the deciding where to place them that's the agonizing part.  I typically spend many minutes staring at various configurations of the tiny sticks in pots, trying to envision them as tall, mature trees. 

 Occasionally my mind wandered...

I do appear to be intently regarding that bottle of wine, don't I?  Here we have it, direct from the telephoto lens on Bruce's camera (he was standing on the porch of the house):  me, longingly staring at the bottle, apparently trying to envision its contents in my glass. 

Far be it for me to cast stones, but someone is turning into the equivalent of a sort of Frogpond paparazzi.  Frogarazzi?


Never mind -- I stand (literally) by my bottle of wine.  All five oaks were planted yesterday and the three tiny pines today. 

In fifteen years these little guys will be forces to be reckoned with -- helped along by a woman with a shovel and her bottle of Chardonnay.  Cheers!