The Right Tool

We ordered 20 pecan trees which were ready last week. Greg picked them up from Blackshear, Georgia to get them so we could take them to the Country House and get them in the ground over the weekend.

There are many varieties of Pecans but the person we bought from suggested the newer Excel variety because of their disease resistance & the fact that they made a good shade tree as well as a good sized nut. He has over 3000 trees that he makes a living from. Excels don't produce as heavily as some of the others but we mainly wanted them for shade on the property.

Doesn't look like much now. This a bundle of 5.

Our plan was to get as many of them in the ground on Saturday (1/26/19), as we could. We were originally going to use the hand held auger we own. We have a 10" & 12" bit for it.

We've used it for many projects & know that it works well in our hard clay, but also know that it can wear you out after just a few holes. So, we asked one of my cousins to come help.

Instead of the hand held auger, he suggested he borrow his Dad's tractor & use my Dad's auger bit which is 20". Much better.

While they were getting the tractor ready I walked the property to place flags where the trees were to be planted. If it wasn't in a place as a standalone tree we made sure to place them at least 50' apart to give them plenty of room to spread out.

Here's a few pics of the nanoseconds it took to dig the holes.

They got started around 11:00a & finished at 3:00! Woo Hoo. That sure wouldn't have happened with the hand held!

It was my job (& my cousins 10 year old son) to build the berms around each one. Sounds easy but it wasn't! As they placed the trees in the hold & filled it & packed it well, the leftover clay was quite hard & packed down around the tree. Some were easier than others but I don't want to 'work' another shovel for a while.

I then set up my watering system in order to give them a good drink before the end of the day.

On Sunday, Greg cut the tops as we had been instructed to do (ouch, that hurt to watch), put mulch in the berms (away from the trunks), gave them another good drink of water & placed 'sleeves' around the bottoms.

Looks kind of bare to me.

In the near future we will stake them to help keep them from blowing around too much. 

In the meantime we picked the last of the oranges. They are hard to peel but the juice is great.

We are expecting rain there this week & Greg will head back up this coming weekend to make sure all is well & give them another good drink.

I think we are done planting trees for a while. Just need to sit back & watch them grow. Fingers, toes, legs, eyes & knees crossed ...

Headed to my yearly Featherweight Quilt Retreat tomorrow .... Scrappy is the theme for this year.