Trees, trees and more trees

Hmmm...

I need 65 trees to replace the ones that have died in my plantation (a loss rate of about 4% which is OK), and I had 10 left over tubes for planting new ones. That's a total of 75 trees, I also owed my wife a tree for our anniversary.

However, partly because of minimum order quantities and partly because of lack of stock elsewhere, I've now ordered today:

50 x sweet chestnut, castanea sativa (I wanted these in my initial order but they were out of stock - great for coppicing and hopefully nut producing, although with chestnut blight that might not come to fruition)
25 x wild pear, pyrus communis (good on wet soil, which mine certainly is - pretty blossom and the fruit might be good for feeding pigs)
10 x common dogwood, cornus sanguinea (pretty red stems, for weaving)
25 x black locust, robinia pseudoacacia (excited about this one - it has amazing scented blossom, grows very quickly, coppices well, makes excellent firewood and is very rot resistant - not a native species, however, but with the climate changing as it is, I don't think that's such a bad thing. I only wanted 10 but there was a minimum order quantity - it's thorny so I was going to plant it around the outside but may relent and put a few standards in)
25 x black maul, salix triandra (the classic weaving willow, also known as almond willow)
1 x black mulberry, morus nigra (anniversary present - to go in our orchard. Will hopefully produce some edible fruits)
1 x almond, prunus dulcis (a present for me! Don't know if it will produce nuts in this country but I can but try!)

That's 137 trees that I have to plant... now I have to decide which get the tubes and which only get spirals (of which I have hundreds!). A less daunting task than before, especially as most of the tubes/stakes are already in position and don't need lugging up hill. Planting spirals is less time consuming too so I should be done in a couple of days, weather permitting. The latter two are larger, pot grown plants.

The plan is to get some old carpet from a local company (who are only too glad to get rid of it) so I can mulch each new planting. I'm hoping I can cover the carpet with woodchip as I have a few tonnes which will make it more visually appealing, but I'm sure the weeds will grow up pretty quickly anyway.