Fertility Islands for Nurturing Baby Trees

This summer was dry - not crazy hot, but August was very dry, just two days with a bit of rain.  July had also been pretty dry.   In our field with 300 plus young chestnut, walnut, and pecan trees (planted in the Spring of this year and the year before), much of the grass was brown and dry.  Good practice says you should water baby trees in that kind of dry spell.  But we were short on workers and I was away all of August (family visit).  So in all that time, we were only able to do a good watering once.    It reminded me a bit of the great Big Foot Tree Death of 2020, a year when we also had young trees in the ground, it was dry and we could not water enough.

​In April of that year, during the intense early phase of COVID lockdown, my daughter Charlotte and I drove up a completely deserted highway 91 on the way from Montague, Massachusetts to Perfect Circle Farm in Vermont.  We were picking up 60 nut trees - walnuts, pecans, heartnuts, and a bundle of five korean pine seedlings - the beginning of the nut orchard at our brand new farm.   Because farming was considered an essential activity, we were allowed to be out, although we were not sure if that included crossing a state line.  Charlotte thought not, and was on the look-out for the police the entire drive.  Happily, nobody stopped us. We had an amiable visit with Buzz Ferver at Perfect Circle - at a distance - and were soon on the way back with a little cargo of healthy, heavily rooted 12” seedlings.   The next day, we planted them all close to where we were building our house so we could keep an eye on them over the summer and make sure they did well.  We also planted 50 baby pecans from Arborday; and 50 baby chestnuts from Forest Agriculture, making a total of about 160 trees in our little nursery.  I had planted a fair number of trees in our food forest in Needham, and with the Boston Permaculture Guild and was pretty confident about the size of the hole to dig, how to tamp the soil, watering the trees in, and their survival.  

It was a hot and dry summer, and our new farm had no infrastructure yet.  We ended up watering the trees by hauling water out of an old, open well 100 yards away.  Despite putting in hours and hours of water-lifting work, we could not keep the soil around the trees moist enough and one by one, our little seedlings gave up the ghost.  By the end of the summer, probably three-quarters of them were dead, and a year later, only about one in ten survived.   It was humiliating.  Sad. Frustrating.  And expensive (160 seedlings are not cheap)  

So, in 2025, with another dry year and baby trees out in the field, I probably should have been more worried than I was.  The soil in the field where those little trees stand is exceptionally sandy - in fact it is part of a rare sand plains ecosystem, most of which is in the Montague Plains just up the street.   It is poor in nutrients.   It drains too well.  There was practically no rain.  And, as I mentioned, we were not able to get to watering as much as good practice would have required.

​But we had given our trees some protections and I had some hope these would help.  .

The year before any of the trees went in, we had marked the 20 by 20 foot grid for the trees with stakes.  We then pushed a few hundred wheelbarrows filled with woodchips out to the field and dumped them in 3-4 foot wide circles where the stakes were.  In some of the circles, the woodchips were preceded by a few buckets of our chicken coop compost.  The idea of putting out the woodchips and compost a year in advance of the trees was to create little islands of fertility.  Islands because we are only treating our poor soil in the very targeted spots where our trees will be planted.  Fertility because in the course of a year, fungi can take hold in the woodchips and penetrate into the soil; while the nutrients in the compost and the increased moisture underneath the chips create little micro-soil climates where the fungi and all the other soil life can increase.  It’s a way of farming that I’m finding I like: create the conditions in which good things can happen, and then leave some time for those good things to come and grow of their own accord.  

Left: a new wood chip pile; Right: note the greener grass around the woodchip pile in summer.

When the trees were planted, they got another dose of woodchips on top of the old (and some got more compost if we remembered).  The main purpose of this second woodchip dose was to be a sponge to hold and gradually release water, and to be a mulch layer to keep water in the soil from evaporating, as well as keeping the soil cool.  

Many of the trees also received tubes and stakes that protect them from browse but also act as mini-greenhouses that hold moisture (good in a dry year; maybe not so good in a wet year).  

Finally, all of the trees had spent a year, or sometimes two years, in the nursery.  We moved the nursery to a location with better soil and water retention than where we planted in 2020.  In this new location, we do very little fertilizing and need to do only very little watering because we let the place get very weedy - the weeds keep the soil cool and moist.  Yes, the weeds slow down growth, but also offer benefits.  First of all, maybe slow growth early in life is good because the tree puts in quality over quantity?   Maybe the weed competition makes them a little tougher?  And maybe they use that time and the weedy resources to create a little beneficial soil life ecosystem around their roots, selecting from the diverse population of soil life all around them, and they take some of that ecosystem with them when they are transplanted?  In any case, the trees have high survival in their weedy home, and they do grow, starting out 12" tall with the girth of a pencil and going out into the fields when they are 2-4’ in height with the circumference of a thumb.  The larger size provides more inherent structure and inner resources against the elements.  

We did not do a proper scientific experiment with one group of treated trees versus another that got the 2020 treatment.  

But the outcome in 2025 was stunning. We went by all the trees this fall, giving them a third dumping of woodchips for the next year and checked on them.  Tree after tree had leaves, new buds, and had put on a bit of growth.  In fact, we found just one dead tree, among all 300 plus.   One little walnut.  

That is amazing. 

Very weedy nursery

The field at planting time with lots of tree tubes already done.

Planting the two- or three-year old seedling.