Paw Paw Seeds

Last fall I bought 20 Pennsylvania Golden / Davis cross paw paw seeds. I kept them in the moist paper towel in a ziploc bag that they were shipped in and placed them in the refrigerator to stratify. They only needed 70-100 days or so but I kept them in a little bit longer than that. After maybe 120 days I took them out and put them in some moistened seedling mix in the same ziploc bag (without the paper towel) and placed them on a shelf to germinate. After two or three weeks they had germinated, as shown above. The seed with the largest taproot is shown, although most of them had roots just barely poking out like the other seed shown. Some hadn't opened up yet, but I planted all 20 with high hopes.

I bought two 10' long corrugated drainage pipes and cut them into foot long lengths. The above picture shows one whole tube and another cut to length. I tied them together securely in groups of four with waxed twine recycled from pine straw bales. I then bundled all 20 tubes loosely with a piece of scrap rope. I filled each tube with organic tree and shrub planting mix and planted each seed about an inch deep. After I watered everything thoroughly and the dirt settled a little bit I had an inch or two of space at the top which I topped very loosely with pine straw.

The whole setup is under a cherry tree by the driveway, not far from access to water. I expect them to come up slowly, first concentrating on their root systems. They'll be in these tubes for at least a year, and may not be planted out until Fall 2018 or maybe even Spring 2019. I don't expect 20 trees to make it to maturity, but I think at least half of them had already germinated before going in the dirt. If I get at least two trees that I can plant near the other two that I have for cross pollination I'll be happy.

Arbor Day Foundation Trees

The Arbor Day Foundation is a wonderful organization, helping to plant trees all over the world and bringing all of the many benefits of trees along with them. As their way of saying thank you for donating to their organization they will ship you about a dozen trees to plant in your yard. The shipping is timed so that the trees arrive to you just in time for planting.

The trees are shipped bare root, you can see them in the white bucket in the above picture. Bare root trees are an extremely cost effective way of shipping trees, but their survival rate isn't as high as those shipped in containers. We had a dozen or so shipped to us last Spring and planted them in the ground the very next day. None of them ever leafed out. 

We weren't expecting a whole lot from free bare root trees, but anything above 0% survival would have been preferred. This past fall we had another dozen shipped to us and on the recommendation of Meredithe's uncle Tim we started them in containers. One of the dozen was a Blue Spruce which, being an evergreen, was easy to see that it had arrived alive. The rest we could have scratched the bark and monitored closely to see if they were still alive, but we just stuck them in these containers and protected them from too much light and wind by placing them along the Southern wall of our shed, back in the woods and hoped for the best.

To our pleasant surprise, they have begun leafing out this Spring. So far I think we have a Dogwood and a Washington Hawthorn. Hopefully more of them will leaf out as the weather continues to warm up this Spring. But even if the others don't make it, at least a 25% survival rate is better than 0%!

Washington Hawthorne

Dogwood

Walnut Bandits!

A couple of months ago I planted 30-40 black walnuts an inch or two down in the soil to stratify for the winter. I thought that covering them with a grate, weighted down by cinder blocks, would be enough to hold off the squirrels. I was wrong. The cinder blocks do, apparently, make a lovely squirrel table. The grate is also easy enough to just tunnel right under and stores walnuts reasonably well... for a squirrel to find and secret away... somewhere else.

I didn't lift the grate and inspect the damage, I just grabbed a few rocks from the driveway and reinforced the sides. I'm hoping that they only absconded with a few walnuts and the rest are still awaiting Spring. I covered the rocks with a little extra dirt, covered it all in pine straw and kept it moving. Maybe they just thought a few should live somewhere else and I'll find a surprise walnut tree somewhere in a couple of years? OR maybe squirrel season doesn't end until February 28th and they'll taste of walnuts. I'll keep you posted.