About those Trees
A month ago, we planted 789 trees in a weekend. Here, today, an update: planting them was not the hard part. Watering them is.
Our well will not be installed until later this spring, and we all expected more rain than we’ve gotten. (So did every farmer we know.) Which means that, to care for these tiny seedlings, we load a 50-gallon drum of water into the bed of the truck, fill a watering can from it, and carry the water by hand to each tree.
At every stop, the ritual is the same: pull back the mulch to find the crown, pour slowly, very slowly, a few careful cups at a time, tuck the mulch back into place, move on to the next.
The watering can does not hold much. Which means dozens of trips to the truck. Back and forth. Forth and back.
You might reasonably ask: why not just drive the truck up to the swales and berms and run a hose from the drum?
This is a fair question.
The answer is that we can’t drive on the grass. Last fall, we drilled seed into this ground to establish cool-season pasture for the horses, and those grasses are still too young, too tender. To run a very large, very heavy truck over them again and again would not be kind.
So in the evenings, we walk.
And walk.
And walk.
1 out of 789.
It is, in every sense, an exercise in patience.
Sometimes it feels meditative. Sometimes it is frustrating as hell, when you look up and realize you do not seem any closer to the end of the row than you did half an hour ago.
But there are joys. A cucumber beetle alighting on a river birch leaf. The infinitesimally small bud peaking out of the stem of a chestnut. The carpet of buttercups. When your face is eighteen inches from the soil for ninety minutes at a time, moving slowly down the berm, you begin to notice all sorts of small lives and small happenings you would otherwise have missed.
Repetitive, unglamorous, difficult to rush. This is the work of watering trees. Of caring for black locust, with their fairy-tale thorns. For the false indigo, who are flourishing so well it feels they're showing off. And for those inscrutable redbuds: much of the time it feels as though you planted a stick and are now watering a stick.
But every now and then, the sudden sight of the smallest heart-shaped leaf.
All of it asks for faith before evidence, for you tend what does not yet look very alive, for you to trust that roots are doing their invisible work.
Some days, land stewardship feels a little dramatic. But many days, it feels like a watering can, a very slow walk, and a hundred tiny acts of belief.
A cheerful false indigo at sunset.
