How To Establish Plants in the Landscape

Hi, I'm Michael Pawlarski. I'm from the Global Earth Repair Foundation, and one of our goals, of course, is global earth repair. And I'm here with my good friend John D Liu, who's with the Ecosystem Restoration Camps Foundation. So we're both passionate about stopping erosion and, and revegetating the earth. And so I'd like to give a little talk today about how to establish plants in an ecosystem restoration sense in wild areas or degraded sites, and what are the different ways to do it. And I'm going to start with the least extensive, or the least intensive, and the least expensive, and work my way towards more resource, need more resource, more labor, more expensive ways of doing it. So we'll start and work our way out. So there's a lot of degraded lands in the world, billions, yeah, well, I guess we could say billions of acres of it. And a lot of it needs more plant cover. And so in some cases, increasing the plant cover can be as simple as reducing the grazing pressure. So right there is sometimes you can just stop hurting the patient, so to speak, and let them recover. But a lot of times we can assist that process. And so one of the fastest ways to get a plant cover is to do direct seeding. And so on a larger scale, I would get a Cyclone seeder, which is a— I spin a lever here and it spins the seed out. We'll show a picture of that with this video. But that Cyclone Seeder will spread seed for a 12 to 15-foot swath in front of me, and I can load it up with tens of thousands of seed, and I can walk around and cover, oh, let's say 10 acres a day with a Cyclone Seeder is not uncommon, you know, in the business. And so all those seeds are going to fall on the soil, and in some instances birds and rodents will come along and pick almost every one of them up and eat them. And so it's been for naught. And so sometimes you actually have to rake them in or harrow them in, or in some way incorporate them into the soil. And another way to do that is to get seeds into the soil deeper is to use a seeder. And there's different kinds of seed machines. There's what are called Rangeland Drills. Rangeland drills are like a farm drill for grain, but they're more rugged. They're built for rugged terrain. You have to pull them behind a tractor or let's say a bulldozer. You could design them actually for, you know, a small unit for perhaps horsepower. But anyway, you drag this drill along and it deposits seed at appropriate depth in the soil. Usually a lot of times let's say a half inch, quarter inch, one inch, depends on the diameter of the seed.

The type of soil, there's a lot of variables.

But what kind of plants? Are you talking about grasses or are they—

Well, I am talking about the whole range. It could be grasses, forbs, herbs, shrubs, trees. All of those can be done with direct seeding. They have developed machines in Australia specifically for direct seeding tree seed. And they can go out with a machine and they can do something like 30 or 50 acres a day of tree seeding. That is a lot of acreage. Again, it has to be the kind of terrain that you can actually get a machine on and drive across. But they're pretty rugged. And they're a small, relatively small machine. One or two slots are being cut in the soil and the seed's being dropped in. So there's tree machines. There's the Rangeland Drills. And then they make these little type of a, it's a handheld, Seeder, that's a tube, there's a container at the top for the seeds, and then it's a tube, and then there's a little scratchy thing at the bottom and a lever. So I scratch the soil and get the tip into there, press the lever, and several seeds fall into that spot. Then you go over there, push it in the ground again, press the lever. And so I can work my way around the landscape pressing the lever and depositing the seed. Another way—

Can I just ask one question? Yeah. You mentioned a number of types and you said forbs. Maybe some people don't know what forbs are.

Okay, forbs are what most people call herbs or wildflowers. They're herbaceous plants. They're not a grass, they're not a woody stem plant. So they're all those herbs and wildflowers. Our term forbs is a Western term, yeah, so it's more of a professional term, I guess, and used a lot in rangeland. So if you hear people talking about forbs, oftentimes maybe they're rangeland managers or cow, you know, ranchers.

Is that also talking about, say, pollinator habitat?

Well, you could be seeding for pollinator plants. You can be seeding whatever kind of plants you want in there, and it's depending what you want on site. It's just so, it's in this case, I'm just looking at you can get seed in the ground using these methods. Another method, and this is with large seeds, tree seeds. There's a book called "The Man Who Planted Hope and Harvested Happiness," and he ran around— this is a story set in the French hillsides where they had been grazed a lot, and this shepherd, every day he filled up a bag with acorns, and as he walked around the landscape with his sheep, He would press the acorns into the ground. And over time, over years, a whole forest sprung up behind him. Now, it turns out that the story may not be true, John D Liu's story, but the principle is very accurate. You can do that, just planting individual plants. Now, I have a friend in New Brunswick, Canada, who was planting walnut trees in situ. Walnuts have a big taproot. They don't really like being transplanted. You want the best walnut tree in the world, don't transplant it. You plant the seed directly. That's in situ planting. He would plant that walnut in the ground, dig a little hole, put it in there, and squirrels would love to dig them up and eat them. And so what he did is he had with him a 5-gallon bucket of wet cow poop and some cayenne pepper in it and things like that. And he would put a plop of that cow poop slurry on over where he planted the seed and then nothing would bother it. And when the seed came up, there was a mulch with fertilizer. And so that's another direct seeding technique is to actually put the mulch in as you plant of something that will protect the tree and mulch it. So another way of getting seed in the ground, which is not very well used, is reseeding from the air. There are various books on the experiments that have been done in different places in the world of seeding with helicopters and airplanes. And Mr. Fukuoka, Masanobu Fukuoka, one of his dreams was to take a lot of the bombers of the world and take them from the military and to fill them up with seeds and fly over the landscape, over the desiccated landscapes, and rain seed down. And if 1 in 100 grew, then you could get a plant establishment. So we're not going to belabor that too much here because we're mainly talking in the ecosystem restoration camp movement of people hands-on doing the work themselves. There's usually not so much machine-oriented.

Another form of seeding is feeding the seed to livestock and letting the livestock wander around and poop the seed out along with their fertilizer. Now, you have to, of course, match the seed with the particular type of livestock. Chickens have gizzards and grind up almost everything. Cows have sort of a—

they digest some seeds, but a lot go through them.

Horses and donkeys, they have a cooler system, and even more of the seeds make it through. So, you have to choose the seed for the type of livestock that will pass through them, and so you feed them. And then you let them wander around the area and deposit the seeds. So there's a nice simple way of getting seeds out. So after seeds, we have to look at— oh, actually one more thing on seeds. Another thing on seeds is pelletizing seeds. A great way to get seeds to take by distributing them on the surface is by pelletizing them. And Masanobu Fukuoka, the natural way of farming guy, one-straw farming in Japan, developed several different methods of pelletizing seed. One, he would start with a cement mixture going around and around, and he would throw a bunch of clay in there and a bunch of the seeds, and he would mist water in there. And as it twirled around and around, the clay gathered with this water on the seeds, and then at the end, he could dump out a whole, you know, a whole container full of seeds that are pelletized. Another way was to mix it in a slurry of clay and then press it through a screen and periodically, you know, scrape off the bottom. And so they broke into little pellets. And they also these days have professional or commercial pelletizing machines for agricultural seeds and for other types of seeds where they pelletize the seed And it's almost always a clay capsule. And the neat thing about clay, about pelletizing, you can add inoculants, you can add fertilizers, you can add cayenne pepper and things that will repel something that might like to eat it. So you can add, you can do inoculants of bacterial inoculant, for instance, of legumes. So this is a great way to get seeds that will germinate. And the permaculture method called seed balls. You actually make little balls with a mixture of seeds and clay, etc., and all that stuff, and then you toss them, go walk around the city or wherever, tossing the seeds, sort of a guerrilla planting style, you know, into ravines or waste areas or industrial parks, tossing little seed balls around to germinate in place. So that's another system, is that pelletizing. So after the seeds, the next way is to grow little plants and plant them out. The simplest way and cheapest simplest way perhaps is to grow things in plugs. So they're little plastic tubes usually. They're different sizes, but they're called plugs, and you plant a seed in there or a little cutting or something. It roots in there, and then you can take that little plant out, and you can take a little small hodad or a small planting shovel, and you can plant them out in the environment. Grass combs is a good one. For instance. So you can have little grasses that can work with things like lomaceans and balsam roots here in the West. So you can use herbs and forbs. It can be even small trees and shrubs, but generally you want bigger stock for trees and shrubs. So this is more for herbs and grasses, usually these little plugs. And then the next thing is to grow trees, commercial, you know, grow trees and nurseries And now I'm going to talk about bare root trees and shrubs because that's what I'm most familiar with. I've been a tree planter. I've worked with, you know, thousands and tens of thousands of bare root trees and shrubs over the years. And so I know how to work with them quite well. And so you get the tree, you know, you can grow them out, dig them in the winter. This is temperate zone. And then you plant them out in the spring. Some places it's a fall planting, but spring or fall. And the timing is really important, especially in a dryland ecosystem restoration project. The timing might be that you only have one month or a several-week window when the soil moisture is at the right level, you can get into the soil, you can get that thing in, and then there's going to be rains for the rest of the spring for it to get established. So you need to— the timing is really critical.

Issue of dormancy?

Well, you want— all bare root trees and shrubs are planted when they're dormant. You dig in the winter or put them in cold storage, or you dig them super early spring before they break dormancy. You keep them dormant, usually in cold storage, until you get them to the planting site.

So this is generally deciduous?

No, oh, and conifer. I planted, uh, you know, they do tons of conifers here in the Pacific Northwest with bare root. Bare root conifers is very, very common. Millions and millions are planted every year. So it's very well scientifically, they got it all figured out. You don't want to J-root them. You have to, and so as a tree planter, I've done that commercially.

You mean by J-root, you mean it doesn't—

You're right. Yeah, if you plant, if you've got a hole that deep and then you put the root in there and it J's up again because it doesn't hang straight down, that's called a J-root. It's almost like a death sentence. So you've got to have the hole deep enough. I use a Hoe Dad usually, and so we're aiming for like, you know, maybe an 18-inch hole, 15-inch hole, something, you know, 12-inch hole, something like that. So you got those roots and sometimes you got an awful big tree in there and you got to figure out how to get those roots in there without j-rooting. Sometimes it can be really tough. The bigger the tree, usually the harder it is. The bigger the root system, you got to get them into the hole. They got to dangle down and then you got to tamp them in really good so that there's good soil contact. You cannot have an empty, empty space, void in the hole at the bottom of the hole. That's another death sentence. So you got to have it packed all the way in. So we have inspectors that come through and dig up a certain percentage of our trees and see if we did a good job. So they're monitoring us closely to make sure we're not messing up. So when we're planting these trees, we sometimes are going to mulch them as we go. We may pull some rocks or some brush from right where we're working. In some cases where there's not rocks or brush to do any mulching, we don't mulch all the time, just sometimes, but in these dryland systems a lot of times you want to have some, a mulch system. So we bring cardboard plaques or sometimes like a little asphalt shingle or tar paper kind of stuff that you actually place around the tree and so it gives it a mulch area. Another thing we can do is we can put a bud cap on it. If there's deer pressure, they have little tiny nettings that go over the top so the deer can't bite the top off. We might also do a bit of fertilizing possibly, and we may even do shading. So in some places it's just so hot in the day on the south side of it, in the northern hemisphere, you have a stake with a piece of cardboard again that's about maybe yay big, and you put that in the ground so that it's just to the south of the tree so it's shaded from the south sun. So that's a lot of extra work. If it's a really dryland technique, you can actually dig little runnels, uh, it's on a slope that will help direct natural runoff to the tree. And so, so you can actually direct water to the tree. That is even more time-consuming. You can do it on a whole big slope with a net and pan system where you have a whole diamond series of diamond shapes little catchments that go up the hill with a tree planted at the bottom of each diamond. So each little catchment area, the water goes to the tree.

The Chinese were also using something called fish-scale terraces, one single terrace per tree, and it's— that's like the most intensive fish-scale terraces. So we'll have to get some fish-scale, uh-huh, rounded, and then the water whatever water comes down, it goes into that bowl.

Right, you have a little basin on the slope so that the water collects in that basin and sinks in right at the—

Basin, the tree.

Right, so little fish scale and little terraces for the trees. Basins, I call them. So we make basins, in this case fish scales. The placement of the tree, and sometimes we would look for the north side of stumps. A lot of times we're doing reforestation. There's stumps around or the north side of rocks. You look for places in the landscape, a little bit of a hollow rather than on a hill. You're looking for the most favored spots where it can work.

Do you think on that thing in the stumps there may be still remnants of mycelial—

There may possibly be. But a stump has roots that go deep into the ground. If the new tree's roots get into that dead root system, they can just shoot all the way down, you know, feet a year. They can go, they can reach greater depths much quicker if they have those old root channels to go into.

So that means it's a better place to plant the tree where there has been a tree before.

Right, and we also use that technique in gardening. By planting deep-rooted plants in succession in the garden to create root channels into the ground for the vegetables to follow down. So you can use it in different ways.

Can I ask you one other thing? I've heard about capillary action, which brings the water up from—

Well, that's why compressing the soil around trees or making pits. Sometimes you make pits in the landscape and plant in the bottom of the pits. Is if you pit a landscape and then all the seeds and the moisture, the water, and if there's dung around or manures, fertility tends to flow into the pits and things germinate in the pits and they're protected from wind. And so it's a very— and they're closer to the groundwater, they're down into the soil. So soil pitting is a way of reducing dust storms. They do it around airports in Australia where they have dust storms. Dust storms because it really reduces the dust storm by doing that pitting. And it's also, you can do seeding and planting in the pits. So there's just endless sort of little permutations on this. And so besides the bare root, now then we can also do potted stock. Some people bring potted plants in, take it out of the pots, and that's, you know, potted stock is more expensive than bare root. And you have to dig a bigger hole. And so it takes more time, so they're more expensive to put in. But there's a lot of species that don't do well as a bare root tree, and so you have to do it as potted stock. And that might be more the case in tropical, subtropical regions than in the temperate regions. You can get away with bare root much more often.

But you can also have the root ball. So if it's growing well in the nursery, and you take the whole root ball.

Yeah, that's called ball and burlap. And so you can do ball and burlap trees, but then now you're getting into maybe $50 a tree or $100 a tree instead of, you know, a dollar a tree. As for bare root trees these days and shrubs, I mainly do— I'm mainly paying $1.50 to $2.50 for most trees, you know, for the conservation grade trees.

But I think on the, on the one hand, we have to consider what is the actual value of ecological function. So when we say, oh, that's too expensive, we can't do that, but we can spend $100 a month for cell phone coverage or something, you know.

Well, you, you, as, as a restorationist, you have to get the most bang for your buck. Generally, we don't have unlimited funds. If we can do it a cheaper way and get success We should do it the least expensive way first rather than going for the most expensive. Now I'm going to describe the most expensive way of doing it. Now this system is called the Kaladendron system. It was developed in Greece and especially for application in the Middle East. He was hired by Sultanates in Saudi Arabia, for instance, who wanted to put in a bunch of big plants in their landscape. And it was like, you know, we're talking serious desert here now in Saudi Arabia and parts of the Middle East and in parts of Greece. So this is for where you have really tough, dry, bad soils. It's a really tough situation and you want to get a tree established. So the method he developed was you dug a pretty good-sized hole in the ground, and this might be, let's say, 3 feet deep and that big, you know, and 3 feet across. So it's a pretty big-sized hole, and you get a big plastic bag that you line the hole with.

But you—

and before you fill it up though with the bag with all your goodies, You cut slits in it so that things can leak out of it and roots can get out of the bag. So now you fill the bag with soil and you always use a lot of polyabsorbent gels, things that absorb 100 times their weight in water. There may be peat moss in there. There's going to be fertilizer in there. There can be mycorrhizal inoculants. You put all the goodies you want in there and then you got your mix in there and you really fill that full of water. So it's just like a big tub of super moist, rich, good stuff. You plant your tree in that and then you pull the tops of the bag up, uh, around close to the trunk of the tree. And anytime you want to water it, you just have to stick a hose in there and the water then goes into the bag and is held in that soil. Now the tree roots eventually just can't subsist in there, so they find those gashes in the bag And of course, water and nutrients are coming out of the bag into and out into the surrounding soils. The roots follow it out and then gradually get established in the surrounding soil. So this is a lot of work and a very expensive way of getting a tree established. But it works when you have a really tough situation. That's the kind of thing they might do in a city like in the Bronx or San Francisco, or say you're in the concrete jungle and you have to get through the pavement first and then dig a hole, and then you might again do something like that. So you use, you do what you have to, to get a good result of what you can afford to, and you have to do a lot of times, especially in these ecosystem restoration, you have to do trials and errors. You have to go out and trial things. Don't go out and spend $10,000 the first year. Spend maybe $500 doing a bunch of little test ones, and then see what works, and then gradually work your way, you know, into bigger and bigger scale. So start at small scale, do your research, see what's been done before in your area. Don't just go like, "Oh, I don't need to learn anything or study anything or read any books. I can just go out and do it." Well, you can, but you'll make more mistakes if you don't do your research. So please do your research and help make those restoration dollars stretch further. So there's a series of ways from least extensive to most intensive, or least intensive to most intensive ways of getting seeds and plant cover on degraded ground. So thank you all for listening. Thank you, John D Liu, for filming this. I'm looking forward to seeing you more.