Tree Huggers

I am but one person with a full time job and a "charity" business I run on the side. We have about 4 months of wet weather to plant in on a good year.

The planting has 3000 plants total, 95% grown by me in nursery. I'm not speedspading as I have to hoe out grass as I go (chemical free site) so I tend to plant approx 50-100 per afternoon I devote to it. 30-60 afternoons say. In one weekend, a flood ripped through and ripped out some oldish ones and a lot of young but I wasn't finished the site so I just replaced and kept working.

If I exclude that event, I can only visualise a few deaths across the entire planting. Failure to thrives aren't included. That's with zero watering but watering in at planting time.

Here is a tree that is 12 months old but the earliest part of site is now 2 years old. The youngest is but a few weeks:

At work we did a planting that had 2 deaths out of 2000; wet years it's easy to keep the numbers high, you have to fuck it up to do otherwise.