First Round Of Seedlings

We are trying something old a little differently this year. In the distant past , back when we first acquired this acreage, we had purchased our seedlings to replant the forest through the Oregon Department of Forestry. They had a massive nursery down south in Elkton and we could The Forestry got out of the business of supplying seedlings for landowners and the Elkton nursery was no longer an option.

Our local Woodland Associations, both Columbia and Washington Counties set up the ability for those of us who are small landowners to be able to purchase seedlings through the Lewis River Nursery in Washington State. It is not a quick process. Each County Small Woodland Association has to first purchase seed, this is done with the partnership of Lewis River. Once the seed is procured the growing can begin but it takes two years from this point for the trees to be big enough for Lewis River to ‘lift’ them from the seedling beds and pack them for distribution to the Counties that have been paying for the trees.

A convoy is usually needed to retrieve all the seedlings and they are sorted to the Landowners that purchased them from the Associations. At this stage we as landowners, pick up our seedlings and begin planting our respective properties.

This year we ordered trees from both Washington County and Columbia County in an effort to avoid tree planting burnout as days can straggle into weeks of poor weather conditions. The Washington County seedlings were lifted from the beds of the nursery almost a full month ahead of the scheduled lift for Columbia County and we got the call on Friday to pick up our trees. The goal was to begin planting some of the areas where we found root rot issues and replace the trees we took out last year with Cedar that are not susceptible to the disease. We had ordered two bags of 100 seedlings each from Washington County Small Woodlands.

Mike drove the trees around from the commercial neighboring property to the top of the hill while Marilyn, I and the dogs walked up from the barn area. It was a glorious sun shine filled day, so much so that it was hard to see the property line tags or the correct direction to go without squinting but we were able to get our Washington County tree order completed just in time to walk down the hill and begin the evening chores.

It took Mike a little longer to get back to the house because the drive around the twisty logging roads of the neighboring property is quite a ride and because we had the dogs encouraging us to go faster down the hill.

It is a good feeling to have the beginning of the seedling planting season behind us even though it is only about a quarter of the planned order. It was also good to make sure my shoveling muscles were tuned up because it has been a long winter of not using them as much as I should have.