Island Mom on the Prairie: Week 3 details

Well, that was a belated week 3 post - and what a week it was! Three long days in a row of hot, backbreaking work - getting up at 4:30 am, getting going with packing lunch and trees and equipment for the day by 5 am, and working til 7 - 7:30 pm. For us novices, it was pretty intense. At the end of it we had planted about 11,000 trees. We used a tree planter machine that was pulled along by a tractor, with 2 people sitting and alternating putting the trees at 1 m intervals in the furrow created by the blade just in front of us. Then 2 wheels behind us covered up the trees with soil. The next process was to lay black plastic mulch cover using another tractor drawn machine and that was a challenge - the plastic came off a roller, and one person had to lay down behind the roller and watch where the plants were and punch a hole in the plastic with a safety knife so the person coming behind could pull the plant out of the plastic. Needless to say, for this operation to be successful the hole puncher had to be accurate! But the bending over to pull was the hard part, especially when you had to do it for kilometers at a time. So each team member tried their hand at each operation, and it was certainly a learning process. Another important process was making sure the trees were kept in a viable state in the hot sun, by keeping them hydrated with wet peat moss in the shade. Since there were mostly no trees to provide shade, this meant the shade of the truck, and we had to move them around during the day to follow the sun.

I was glad to take the rest of the week off, to recover and work on some other stuff!