What 6,000 Native Trees Look Like After 3 Years.

Three years ago, this whole area was only grass. Just like this grassland right next to it. And after planting about 6,000 native plants, this is really starting to feel like a tiny little forest. With some of these trees that have grown more than three meters in three years, so that's an average of one meter per year of growth, give nature only the tiniest chance and she'll explode with life and bounce back with such extreme speed and vigor that it's almost unbelievable. In this video, I'll talk about four different things related to the project. First, a quick summary of the project and what has happened over the past three years. Then secondly, I wanna highlight a few specific details that apply to this project. For example, the first summer was one of the driest ones we've ever had. Then thirdly, we'll talk about costs. So how much money went into it, how many days of planting, how many volunteers were involved. And then lastly, I wanna share some guidelines or principles that we used over here for this project, that you can use anywhere around the world. So whether you're local here in Aotearoa New Zealand or watching from the northern hemisphere, come along for the journey and see for yourself how nature has in only three years time helped transform this grassland into a budding tiny native forest. Chapter one. This is a tiny plot of grassland that is nestled amongst a huge expanse of vineyards. The first two years of the project we planted about 6,000 native plants and the total surface area is around 4,000 square meters, which is roughly an acre in size. That's an average of 1.5 native plants per square meter. That's a whole lot of native plants for a very tiny area. It's a little bit difficult to capture on camera just how impressive this little project is after only three years of growing. There's areas where I can barely push through because the plants that have been planted are just so bushy and so strong and so big that I can barely get through and it's just absolutely bonkers the amount of growth that they've done in three years and I can't help but wonder what would it look like in another three years. So you might ask why are we planting so many plants so close together? Well the first clue is if you go into a healthy forest you'll find that all the seedlings and all the plants in general grow very close together. The theory behind that is the plants are trying to capture as much sunlight as possible for example there's trees that will grow tall and straight to capture all the sunlight as high as possible there's plants that will bush out more in the initial stages to capture the sunlight that goes sideways there's plants like the grasses and flaxes which will be more ground cover it's almost like 3d chess or puzzles where all of them together are trying to maximize the amount of surface area that is able to capture the sunlight. The second goal of the high density planting is to help shade out the grass as quickly as possible. I'm here underneath a gorgeous coprosma, which is now two years old, and you can see that the grass is losing its vigor a little bit. It's not completely gone yet, but over time as this coprosma leafs out more and shades out even more, this grass will completely disappear. There's a little bit of dappled light left which is why the grass is still around but this is the effect one of the effects of closing the canopy as quickly as possible is that the grass will slowly fade away we actually applied what is a relatively lazy method of planting and in a nutshell it was basically planting the holes and planting the plants in those holes there was no spraying there was no weeding there was no irrigation or external water whatsoever the first step was to mow the grass. Then the holes were pre-drilled so the plants would be easily planted by a group of volunteers. All those plants got a weed mat and a plant protector and then once the plants were planted we've gone through and flattened the grass around the plants. So that's pretty much all that went into for the planting. Then of course there was maintenance for keeping the pathways free which is a bit of mowing and then one-off investment into setting up the fence around the whole perimeter. Planting happened in stages. It happened in only the first two years. Most planting happened in the wintertime, which is what most plants would prefer since they'll be a bit more dormant and the weather is more favorable for planting. Now that we're in year three, there's very little effort and maintenance required at this stage. There's a bit of mowing of the pathways, but other than that, it is just letting the plants do their thing and let them keep growing so that there'll be a forest in no time. chapter two. Let's dive into some of the details for this land and I want to specifically look at the first two years because the first year we had an extreme drought and then the second year we had a flood. So weren't ideal conditions to start baby plants off on their journey in life. Over that first year the plants only had 374 millimeters of rain which is less than 15 inches in that total first year. It was the second driest year on record and for their first summer they only had about 33 millimetres of rain which is less than an inch and a half. Due to a high water table the plants were able to get through that very dry summer and the losses were very marginal in that period. Then the second year in the wintertime we had flooding partially due to the high water table so we lost a couple of plants to that. That is expected for any planting project of these sizes. You can expect about 10-15 percent losses and we're probably lower than that. We've not counted the plants since then but the majority of the plants are still alive. part three let's talk about money I want to talk through some numbers in this section of the video not because this is going to be directly applicable to your situation but more so to give you an idea of the amount of money that's involved and what's required and what isn't required for a project like this to start off the things that cost money were the fence the plants the plant protectors and the mats that went around it and there was also an investment done into a drill to pre-drill the holes for the plants. In total there's probably about 40,000 New Zealand dollars that were invested in this project however all those were a one-time investment so the fence and the plants all needed to be bought once and never again. On the other hand the labour was all voluntary so the planting days there was seven planting days in total all done by volunteers there was four days of releasing plants in the first year and And there was also the maintenance of the pathways, the mowing of the pathways, and a few other small bits and pieces, but that was all voluntary. There was also no spraying, there was no weeding, there was no other input besides the things that I just mentioned. Initially, the plan was to buy and plant 9,000 plants. However, after the first year, in which about 5,000 were planted, the adjustment was made to drop it down to 6,000 plants. That was because the experience in the first year showed that about a meter distance between the plants was the ideal planting distance. So $5,000 in the first year and about $1,000 in the second year. All that money was sourced from several different grants, so several different sources of money that went into this project. But as it is not a registered company, but just a group of volunteers, they were able to apply for some of those grants. Other than that, there was no costs involved with this project whatsoever. and now in year three it's basically maintaining the pathways and just walking around and enjoying the company of all these beautiful trees chapter four summary as we wrap up this video there's three principles or guidelines that i want to leave you with although the specific circumstances of this project won't necessarily apply to your project wherever you are you need to think about your local ecology and the details of your land. However, I think there's three principles that we've applied here that can be applied universally. Number one, plant a high diversity of species. Number two, plant a high density of species. And number three, the most important one, simply start. And by starting, I don't necessarily mean grab a bunch of random plants and stick them into the ground. Starting can also mean look around in your area and see what plants are growing there already, what native plants are the ones that thrive in your area. You can order some plants, you can do a bit of research, you can get a group of volunteers together. One of the great things about this project is a lot of the plants went into the ground the first year, but not all of them. So that allowed us to observe and see what species did well and which ones didn't do as well. So we were able to adapt the species that were planted in the second year based on the observations in the first year. So a high diversity of species was one of the goals from this project from the start. So rather than work with the typical pioneer species, which are more common in planting projects, the goal really was to plant a high diversity of species and see how they would do. One of the benefits of that has been that we lost a few species that didn't do well in these specific circumstances. But overall, the trend has been that the majority of the species have done quite well and have taken off. Same goes for the high density planting, which was one of the goals from the start as well. That has really helped the plants cover the area in a short amount of time. They're also already starting to shade out the grass and they're also growing nicely together and providing wind protection and shelter for all kinds of species. Overall, I hope this video has showcased just how quickly nature can regenerate if we give her a tiny little chance and if we help her along. To then end with a little bit of a cliche, the best day to plant a tree was not 20 years ago, but three years ago, as you can see, but the second best day is to plant one today or tomorrow. And if you enjoy watching nature regenerate, I'm documenting our own project, which is 22 hectares of pine forest regenerating into native forest, and I'll link to the video on screen now.