Planting a Forest in a Day

So I've recently reached 300,000 subscribers and I thought it'd be cool to mark this milestone by planting a forest of 300 trees here on my property. If you didn't know, my name's Calum and I live here in New Zealand on a two-acre piece of land that was originally part of a large dairy farm and was basically just an empty grass paddock before we bought it four years ago and started to develop it into our home. And while many of you know me through my love of growing my own food and fruit trees, I'm also someone who loves being out there in the forest amongst native trees, wildlife and rivers. I mean who doesn't enjoy that? I'm really bush bashing at this point but can I just say I'm very glad I live in New Zealand and not Australia. No snakes here. Right now I'm in a small forest with some really beautiful trees and lots of diversity and this is only around 10 minutes drive from where I live and it's a stark contrast to the land back home where we look out over rolling grasslands which does look beautiful but it is devoid of almost all native trees and wildlife with just a few patches of exotic trees and introduced animals. I do often look down at this grass and think about how not so long ago this would have been just like that forest I visited with a forest floor teeming with life like fungi, mosses and insects with a diverse canopy of trees towering overhead. One of the goals I have for this piece of land is to create some nice areas of native forest and bring back some of the lost habitats and native food sources to hopefully be able to support some of the native wildlife that would have once thrived here before this was turned into a grassland. So far we have planted a few hundred native trees which are doing well but we've learned a bit from trial and error so I'll share more about that as we go but let's head off now and pick up those 300 trees that we need to get this project underway. All right let's go. Get some more wheelbarrows. Last three trees. All right there we go a full load of trees all packed up just in time before the rain. Before we can get the trees in the ground I've got to make a fence to keep the sheep out and we're going to plant this area up that's on one of our property boundaries. It's about four meters wide and 60 meters long. This should create some privacy from our neighbours as well as some pretty good wind protection since we do get pretty wind swept here at times. Now I've just got to pack these in and I've got some mesh to put up between the poles but I'll do that once the trees are planted so that we've got better access for planting day. All right guys so it's planting day today and we're starting with the most important part of the day sunblock. All right so first off I'm just moving the sheep out of the paddock so they don't eat my trees and I'm also mowing the planting area down nice and short and I'll talk more about how we'll continue to manage this grass later on. When it comes to planting a forest it's good to think about the natural processes of succession that a forest would go through because they do develop over several stages where each group of plants kind of improves conditions for the next. For a bare site like this you would initially have light demanding pioneer species which is pretty much what we'll be planting today. I've selected quite hardy trees and shrubs that can tolerate exposed conditions like strong winds, frost and drought and these are the trees that we know do well here and are some of the types of plants that would grow naturally if a deforested site is left to naturally restore itself. There we go, first tree planted, lots more to go. So I've got Caroline out here helping me plant the trees and for the layout of the planting, although I do like to plant things a bit more randomly, for this one we're planting them in three rows mainly because there's horses on one side and sheep on the other side and so we have to keep them far enough away so they can't be reached. We're also planting the trees much closer together than some of the other native areas that we've planted because we found that the trees that we planted more densely grew much quicker and they were also able to shade the ground out much faster and because of that shade any rain that we got was able to more easily soak into the ground before it evaporated, making the trees more resistant to drought. In the early stages of a New Zealand forest one of the first types of trees that you'll see show up are manuka, also called tea tree. They've got these kind of spiky dark green leaves and they've got a very particular scent to them as well. Smells so good. Oils can be extracted from these trees to make manuka oil which has strong antibacterial and antifungal properties and it's used for different skin conditions like acne, wounds, insect bites and it's also used for body odour. And they've also got these beautiful white flowers which bees collect the nectar from to make manuka honey and manuka honey is used all around the world not just for eating but also for its medicinal qualities and it's used for healing things like wounds, burns and ulcers. So yeah they're pretty cool trees and great to have in the early stages of growing a forest. Although we are taking a bit of grazing land away from our sheep by fencing this off, one of the things we're doing to mitigate this is planting some tree lucerne or tagasasti trees. These are the only non-native tree that we're planting but they're really fast growing nitrogen fixing trees and they're really good for sheep fodder as well. So basically we'll be able to cut some of these trees over time if we want to feed some to our sheep and the trees will also be improving the soil as they grow and benefiting the other trees growing nearby. We don't plan to have these tree lucerne growing in our native area for the long term but as the forest grows bigger it should start to benefit the productivity of the grass in the paddocks that it shelters by giving wind protection and some shade and I'm hoping as a result that our grass stays greener for longer into the summer which should also benefit our sheep. In a few years time when these trees have become more of a shrubland providing some shade and shelter what I would like to do is add some more native diversity by planting some other species in amongst that would usually occur when there's more shade and shelter like kauakaua and mahaui as well as some of the taller emergent forest trees like kauri, rimu and kahikatea as a few examples. When we first planted up these other native areas on our property we did trial some of those later stage forest trees just to see how they would go and they just didn't do well at all it was just too dry and too sunny for them and those are trees that are more adapted to being able to grow with that shade and shelter already established so that's why we've gone for these more early stage succession trees to get the forest going. Look at this massive worm it's a beast We've just had a bit of a break Caroline's just chilling out for a bit so I'm going to carry on there's about 130 trees left to go but it is getting later in the afternoon and there's rain on the way so I'm going to carry on to try and get these all planted today. To give you an idea of some of the types of trees that we're planting we've got a few types of pittosporum like this kohuhu also called black matapou and these ones here called tarata also known as lemonwood and you can see how they got their name by crushing the leaves and giving them a smell they smell very much like lemon and they're used by Maori people as a perfume and the bark of these trees have a lot of gum in them as well and this was apparently used and rolled into balls with the sap of puha plants and chewed like chewing gum and even used as a type of glue. We're also growing some of these cabbage trees or te kauka and these ones grow into like a almost palm-like tree they give the forest kind of a tropical kind of look I reckon but I once found one of these deep in a New Zealand national park it was absolutely massive and as you can see I'm very ecstatic about it but it was the largest cabbage tree I've ever seen in my life by a huge margin I've never seen one with a trunk that large before it was very very impressive and these trees have been used by Maori for many things including food medicine and weaving the edible parts include the central shoot as well as the stems and rhizomes so yeah they're pretty cool and they grow these like flower clusters on them as well which turn into big bunches of berries which birds love to eat so yeah a great tree all around that's pretty hardy to a lot of conditions these akiaki here are one of the fastest growing native trees that we've planted here they've done really well and they grow heaps of flowers which turn into these papery seed capsules which are spread by the wind and we've already started to see them self-seeding on our property here which is awesome the timber is one of the hardest native woods and it was used by Maori to make things like walking sticks and weapons like taiaha apparently the leaves have some uses as well like chewing them up without swallowing the juice to relieve a toothache or even using the juice or chewed up leaves on things like stingray stings or other wounds or rashes we're planting a bunch of these trees too which are a type of coprosma called karamu they grow into quite a large bushy shrub like this one here and they're actually in the same family as the coffee tree and these ones have a ton of these little flowers all over them right now but those turn into big clusters of orange berries which birds love to eat but they're really juicy and kind of mildly sweet and I just mostly leave them for the birds but I'll eat the odd one and what's really cool about coprosma oh look a little little ladybug is if you look at the back of the leaf of most coprosma species you'll find these little pockets or indentations at the base of the veins and these are called domacia and those little hollows that the trees form on the leaves basically provide a little home where predatory mites can live in a mutualistic relationship with the plant and they'll defend it against things like foliar mites and pathogens and yeah I just find it really amazing and such a cool adaption that these trees have developed we've got these koufai here which are a nitrogen fixing tree and they grow these beautiful yellow flowers and they're often fed on by nectar eating birds and traditionally it's been thought by Maori that when koufai trees bloom that it's a good indication of when to plant kumara or sweet potato. I know that some of you guys are probably watching from overseas and so me sharing about New Zealand species is probably less relevant to you but I do hope that it encourages some of you to learn a bit more about the native species around where you live because no matter where you live I'm pretty sure there'll be some pretty interesting stuff native to your area and it's not only interesting to know about but it can be some pretty useful knowledge to have as well. All right last couple of trees all right there's 299 one more to go all right there we go there is our 300th tree in the ground I'm so stoked to have got these all in today because we're expecting like a whole bunch of rain tonight so that's going to really help water them in but there is a few more things left to do which we'll come back and do shortly just to finish them off and set them up for success over the summer. All right so we're back and these trees have just had so much rain and it's been a couple of weeks since we planted them so we're definitely ready now to get on to the next stage and this grass is already getting pretty long and out of control so the first thing we're doing is I've gone and got a whole bunch of bamboo stakes and we're just going to go along and stake these trees and that's just going to make sure we don't lose any of them in the grass and also we can tie up any that do need all right so the next thing that we're going to do I think is going to make quite a big difference to these trees because as you can see this grass is already growing around them it's going to be a nightmare to maintain and just create too much competition and these trees are just not going to thrive with so much grass around them so what we're going to do is put a layer of cardboard around all of these trees and then cover that cardboard up with mulch basically what the cardboard is going to do is just suppress the grass and the weeds block the light from getting to them and that way the cardboard and the weeds underneath can decompose all at the same time and I usually find that cardboard only lasts around two months anyway before it fully has broken down and then that will just leave a nice layer of mulch over the top which is going to help to keep that moisture in around the trees over the summer and help to feed the trees over time there will still be a bit of grass growing in between the areas that we haven't mulched in between the trees but this should be fairly easy now just to come through with a weed eater and trim that down without the risk of accidentally hitting into the trees or cutting them down I'm thinking that in about a year's time or so once the trees have established a bit I'll put the chickens in here for a period of time because we did that with our other native areas and they did a really good job of eating the grass and the weeds and scratching up and fertilizing the ground a bit and since then with a bit of natural leaf fall and with the trees shading the ground out really well we're now seeing a natural forest floor start to form which is really awesome because now these areas can fully take care of themselves as they continue to grow and mature the last thing I wanted to say is well firstly thank you to Caroline for helping me get all of these trees in the ground it was definitely a good team effort to do it in a day and secondly thank you guys so much for all of your support of me over here on YouTube it really does mean a lot and I think it's so cool that I've now got all these trees planted as a representation of all you guys and over time we can continue to watch it grow and turn into a beautiful forest together