How to Increase the number Nut Trees and why should I???

 Nut Trees need to be Increased!

I have recently been pondering the future of our property and what we should be producing and what we shouldn't be producing. 

I would love to plant a lot more trees on the property but it has some challenges (see Revegetation Blog). However animal are a major contributing factor to Climate Change especially ruminants that burp and fart methane which is 28 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

So what to do?

We have some hazel nut trees on the property as well as a couple of Sweet Chestnuts (I had originally planted 8 but only two have survived and they really struggle to cross pollinate despite being located next to each other! So I have decided to increase our nut tree population in two ways.

I reached out to Jennifer on the West Bank of the Motueka River and from who we have in the past bought Sweet Chestnut from to see if she would allow me to buy some sweet chestnuts that I could try to germinate. And of course, after I had explained the objective of my call, she said, "What the heck John, you don't have to pay me just come over and pick up all the chestnuts that you need from under our mature trees". This is soooooo typical of people in New Zealand, incredibly generous and friendly, something that I love about living in New Zealand.

So I now have around 50 chestnut seeds stratifying in our fridge for 90 days, with my fingers crossed that they will germinate. I have previously germinated Chestnuts this way so have high hopes that this will work.

Now for the hazel nuts I decided to try a different method, mainly because our hazel nuts are not yet producing nuts and because I thought that layering would be fun. By layering we will get a clone of the parent plant which in itself is pretty useful if only I hadn't been so stingy as to buy unnamed mother plants which have dubious production abilities! Urgh:>)

Anyhow laying of hazel nut is supposed to be easy.

This diagram shows the basic principal. With Hazel Nut trees one uses the suckers that they produce and I struggled to bend the suckers so much as in the diagram so decided to bend the sucker to a pot and hope to get the sucker to root in the pot which I can plant in a new location!

So I layered eight hazel nut tree suckers into pot with metal pegs to hold the sucker under the compost and a bamboo cane to hold the sucker shoot as straight up as possible. Looked back on my work and proudly walked away.

But unknown to me the chooks had also been watching me and they immediately walked over to check on my work and obviously disapproved as they immediately started digging in the soil of the pots which resulted in the hazel nut suckers coming to the surface thus destroying what I had done.

Damn those chooks!!!!

Once I realised what had happened I realised that there were two options. Kill the Chooks or protect the pots from the chooks.

I decided on the second option, although it was a close thing!

I used two different methods and to date both have been successful. Now all I have to do is wait six months to see if any of the hazel nut suckers actually root! I am starting to realise that agriculture really requires a lot of patience and perseverance!

Revegetation: How many Plants!!!!!

 Revegetation: How Many Plants!!!!

We were recently fortunate enough to be given 400 native plants under the "Restoring the Moutere" project which aims to have 270,000 new trees planted in the Moutere Catchment are over the next three years using a $1.9 million grant from the One Billion Trees initiative. The project aims to achieve a catchment-scale restoration of native riparian ecosystems and wetlands and improve the water quality for the Moutere River and its tributaries and inlet.

All the family have been involved in the planting (some a little reluctantly I have to say:>) but I think that it is important that they understand and get first hand experience of planting trees and see that their parents also think that it is an important activity. We have set aside about 10% of our property for replanting, largely around its perimeters where the Flaxmore drain and the Company Ditch runs.

All the family were involved in the planting

Plants by the Company Ditch

Plants by the Flaxmore Drain.

To date we have planted around 300 plants and I can tell you it is a herculean task especially where the soil is stony and a pick axe has to be used to make the hole! It is slow and arduous! But we are getting there.

However once we started planting it became apparent that the number of plants that we had was insufficient for the areas that we wanted to plant so I ask for additional plants and got another 300 plants.

Lets look at the maths for how many plants are required to revegetate a 1 hectare plot. If the plants are planted at 1.5m intervals this means that in one line there would be 100/1.5 plants = 67 plants. so in 1 hectare (100m x 100m) we would need 67 x 67 plants = 4,489 plants!!!! What the heck that is a lot of plants!

Our property is 10 acres big = 4 hectares. If we intend to revegetate 10% then that is 0.4 hectares which would require 4,489 plants per hectare x 0.4 = 1,795 OMG so many!!!!

We have received 700 plants so far which is only 39% of the number of plants that we require. 

I can see another request for plants being developed for next year ( which is the final year of the programme).

It is INCREDIBLE just how many plants are needed for revegetation programmes.