BEHOLD SHADOWMAN, PLANTER OF PINES!
Last week, I noticed middle school kids roaming the halls with these pine seedlings. Each pine pup was in a ziploc bag with planting instructions attached.
When I asked one girl about the source of the baby pines, the response was, "Huh, I don't know, ... the FFA teacher was giving them out. What do we do with them?"
"Well, you take them home and plant them."
"I don't want to do that."
"Well, why did you take one?"
"They were free."
"If you really don't want it, don't throw it away. Give it to me and I will plant it for you and provide it a good home."
She handed me the pine and bounded away into a nearby classroom.
In a few minutes, about 3 other kids from that class zipped over and gave me their pine orphans.
Florida's Arbor Day falls earlier than the National Arbor Day due to our climate, so I believe the Ag teacher had presented an Arbor Day lesson that day and the free pine pups were a nice touch to the lesson.
I took them home and planted them around the bare skeleton of a massive turkey oak that just up and died on my about two years ago. The soil is good there and the leafless turkey oak no longer shades the ground, so I'm predicting good times ahead for these young longleaf pines.
About a hundred years from now this little guy is going to be awesome!
9 comments:
I'm doing a lesson with 4-H Cloverbuds (5-7 year olds) and also giving away pine seedlings (got them from the DOF nursery in Chiefland). But, I'm going to encourage those who don't want them to plant them in the schoolyard. I can't imagine a Cloverbud not wanting to dig in the dirt and plant a plant though.
When "SPC Dude" was still a mere "Dudicus Orealious" he brought home a similar type of seedling. We lived in an apartment at the time so we took it back to KC and planted it at Mom and Dad's. It's huge now!
Nice save! I love those little trees that come in baggies. I once got a Colorado blue spruce that fit in my post office box (I have the smallest one they offer). It came from a cereal box offer. lol
And it is a big tree now...
Just started a little white spruce Alan brought home from the fair.
Are they native to your area?
I hope you have better success at protecting them from marauding deer than I have with my shortleaf pines.
Free trees! Cool! Someone gave us a boxful when we first moved here. Some of those are probably around 20-25' now. OK, I'm really bad at guesstimating measures, but it looks like one of my 6(+)-footers can stand by one and we could stack him at least 3-4 times. 8-}
Emily,
The middleschool wheel classes funnel all ms kids through an ag short course for exposure, so plenty of them are not in to it.
Dave,
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago!
3C,
Neat, trees from cereal companies!
Pablo,
Even more than I am.
Sophie,
Free is good. Tree is good. It's all good.
They say the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is right now! Too bad you only got three.
We always order trees every year to plant on the property! Great post!
Pablo,
Imagine the vast hickory forest about to spring up from all those nuts I planted this winter!
Lisa,
Keep on planting!!!
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