In article , mike hagen
wrote:

Jan Flora wrote:
In article ,
(John Ponder) wrote:


[...]

The truth be told, the SO and I have a pretty good time working out there
in the woods, planting the little goddammits. It sure beats a lot of other
things we could be doing : )

Jan
Like they say, that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. There are
limits though! (Think of cheese) Sorry - I'm an old tree planter myself.
Paid my way through forest engineering school many years ago. Our group
worked the Northern California and Oregon coast in the 70's. Our
mexicans were by far the best planters, often hitting 2000 on good days.
Us gringos could hit 1500 consistently after we had been in practice for
several weeks and occasionally went above that. Fresh guys in off the
street were dying at 600. These were containerized DF and RW plugs, and
we planted with either dbibbles or hoedads depending on the contract.
The ground varied from "cat ground" to steep high leads. The worst was
going into units which had lots of naturals left and deep slash - you'd
carry your trees forever hunting planting spots. Those were always a
mistake of the planting forester.

Why are you planting to FS specs on your own land? Accounting for
naturals is part of the job. Unless they're damaged, that's where your
genetic diversity is retained.

We're planting to FS specs because we're in the FIP program. Our local
SWCD supervisors all signed up, because all of us had dead timber, and
wanted to see if this program could/should be recommended to cooperators
and area landowners. The FS guys seems to finally be getting on step,
figuring out how to administer this program. It's been a shakey start.

I used to work around Mexican crews who were pruning wine grapes and
apple trees. Those guys are flat incredible. I've done a lot of large home
apple orchards, and there's *no way* I could ever approach the speed
and accuracy of their work.

We groomed our little woodlot with a brush rake on a farm tractor and
with the root rake on our old stringblade D-7 before planting. It helped a
lot to gather the slash into burn piles, so we had pretty clear planting areas.
(The guys had tremendous burn piles lit, while they logged with a big
excavator. Stacked the trees & slash as they went.)

Gee, just hearing the term "high lead" makes me tired these days.

Jan