442-Harnessing the Potential of Saplings, with Basil Camu

Hi, everybody. This is Joe Lample, the Joe behind Joe Gardner, and welcome to the Joe Gardner Show. I am so happy to have my friend Basil Camus back for, I think this is podcast episode number four, but we've talked about a number of things. His expertise is vast, but he is a real specialist in tree care, and he has a love for saplings like I do, but he knows a lot more about them than I do. And so that's the nature of today's conversation. So let's get into that. And as we do, thanks to our sponsors for today's episode, Cool Springs Press and the Ultimate Gardening Sheet. I love a good book, especially when it's about gardening. And as a listener to this podcast, you've heard me interview a lot of gardening authors. And it's no surprise to me that many of them share the same publisher, Cool Springs Press, including all three of my books. And that's because Cool Springs Press is a leading publisher of gardening books written by experts who live and love gardening. 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And after years of being frustrated with not having a comfortable and secure way to carry the three tools I use every day in the garden, my pruners, soil knife, and micro snips, I finally have what I had been missing for a very long time. Handcrafted from beautiful leather, it's sleek, comfortable, and built to last. Nothing bulky or awkward, just a smart triple stack low profile design that works. Make this the time you realize how much you've been missing your own ultimate gardening sheath once you finally have it. You can find it exclusively and learn more at joegardner.com slash ugs. That's joegardner.com slash ugs. Welcome back. I always look forward to my conversations with you. And I want to relish this one. So I'm excited to talk about saplings along with anything else you want to talk about and feel free to expand. That's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Always a great time. Excited to chat about saplings. One of my many odd passions in life. And I've always wanted to do a very designated deep dive on saplings. So thanks for giving me this opportunity. You're welcome. You know, we talked about this in past conversations because it was something that was intriguing to me as well. But we always already had a full plate. So we really couldn't fit it in fully into its own episode. But here we are. Let's go with it. So let's do this first of all for those. I mean, I think we all kind of have a sense of what a sapling is. We've seen them. We've heard of them before. But there's so much more to the unsung hero of the little whip with the tiny roots. So give us the basic definition of a sapling verse and then we'll just take off from there. Yeah, that's perfect. Because there's a lot of disagreement about sapling, seedling, etc. So the way I define a sapling is typically it is a tree or a shrub that's between one and three years old. I actually typically use them at one sometimes two years, but it could be up to three. And then typically these are going to be anywhere from pencil height up through some species will grow very quickly like a black walnut will shoot right up. So that could be three feet tall at one year old. Wow. Okay. So between one and three years old, those are the parameters that you said you've placed around it. What happens after three years? Is it too big to be qualified as a sapling? Is that it? Yeah, what happens is after that point, you start having to do pretty substantial root damage if you're digging it out. Okay. Or if you're growing in a pot, now we're getting a lot of root bind bound issues. I mean, even at one or two years old, you can have problems with with circling roots. It's not to say that it'd be a meeting. But beyond this point, it really is too big for a pot. And if you dig it out, it's pretty, you know, it's going to do a lot of damage. Okay. Well, you know, I teased right off the bat, you're, you have a real enthusiasm for saplings. And so do I. So what is it about a sapling that you're so bullish on? There's so many things. All right. So it kind of all began when you get into the world of proper planting, working with volunteers to teach them or teaching your staff how to do it. If you're going to plant a containerized tree or a bolden burlap, there are so many steps you have to follow in order to excavate the root collar and detangle the roots and all these steps. It's, I think I said this on one of our earlier conversations, but our how to video on this is 27 minutes long. It's a high technical barrier. When saplings are the exact opposite, you literally slot your shovel in the ground, make sure you don't put the leaves in, get the roots in and then close it. They don't even have a root collar at this point. So the technical expertise on planting a sapling, sapling is so easy. I also like the fact that they establish right away. So you know, that gardening adage, first year they sleep, second year they creep, third year they leap. Well, the saplings go straight on to leaping. There's really no sleeping or creeping, which I love. I'm just going to go ahead and hit all my highlights here. Do it. Four or five of these. Yeah. Okay, cool. So they're also super cheap. I mean, you're talking about $1 to $3 of sapling if you buy them. And hopefully today we can actually talk about how we grow them. But if not growing is very easy to do. So for this, you know, a typical what 15 gallon oak, if you're buying it from the nursery or retail nursery especially, you're probably paying $85. That's 40 saplings. And you're going to not spend any more time planting those saplings because you can do, well, I can do 40 an hour, but if you're brand new, 25 an hour is probably what you can do. So you've got all that going. Okay, let me stop you right there. So the oak tree, obviously, it's one tree and it's a chunk of money compared to 40 for the same price. Difference in size, obviously from the get go is significant, no doubt. But are we at a point where we want to just talk about how they catch up or do we want to do that later? Because, yeah, no, let's just go. Okay. I don't like to, I like to just see where this comes from. You nailed it in the most serious challenge we face, which is convincing people that this little scrawny tree is going to outpace that big tree that you plant. We've got a lot of studies and grow trials and just getting photos from clients. I mean, we're seeing cases where these saplings will go from pencil size to eight feet tall and less than two years. I actually just sent you a photo today that you can use with this episode if you want showing a 20 month old oak sapling that's crazy tall. So I think it's just a matter of showing people the photos and the evidence and like the, Hey, here's on average, how fast this will outpace a 15 gallon versus a 25 gallon. We just need more education around this. And then people will get it. It's like, yeah, it's a little bit of delayed gratification, but you're going to get that same big tree in just a few years. And the sapling is going to go on to be a lot healthier because it never had to deal with what is probably the biggest problem on containerized trees. And that's the mangled root system. Same for BNBs. They're not mangled per se, but they've just been torn apart and reduced by 70%. 70% of the roots that it had are gone to fit into a little tiny burlap sack to contain whatever's left, which isn't anything really. So years of establishment, once it's back in the ground and hopefully it lives, you're giving that part up before it ever thinks about putting on any new top growth, right? Right. Here's the other thing. This is the one that really like, we've already got a pretty strong case for saplings here, but let's keep going. The grow methodology for most trees is like a day at the spot. So they're getting pampered with fertilizers and water every day and warm conditions. And then these nursery grown trees get taken out into the real world and like, what is happening right now? There is no water out here. And this is why it's a 50% mortality across the US for all landscape planted trees. It's astronomical. And we've lost the tree, a lot of wasted resources. So you put that same sapling in that space and it doesn't need the requirements that a big tree needs, especially a pampered big tree. It just needs a little bit of rain throughout the year. The main thing you have to do to keep a sapling safe is you do have to do a deer cage or a lawnmower cage, whatever, same difference. And that really is pretty simple. We build these quick little cages using, it's somewhere between a chicken wire and one of those real hard steel fences. But you can bend it, you turn it on itself and you just use zip ties and you've got a hoop, you place it on top and you take some sod staples and just pin it in the ground. And that's, I mean, that's all you do. That's it. So we're talking, I guess this bullet point that we talked about, we talked about fast, cheap, this next one that you just talked about, would that go into the category? Maybe if we gave it a name, more reliable establishment? Yeah, less maintenance and more, more hardy in that harsh suburban condition. Okay. All right. So that's three. The one I kind of swerved into sideways was the root structure, which I think that's probably the biggest one. Yeah, that's the lifeblood of the rest of the tree. That's everything about it. Yeah, oftentimes we'll work in a neighborhood and the tree's having problems and it's a 15 year old maple, maybe pushing 20. And then you start getting into the ground because maybe we're doing a root color excavation or whatever, you know, whatever. There's a lot of stuff that happens with roots and soil. And what we'll find is just this circling bunch of roots, they never actually grew properly. And then you realize, oh, this whole line of trees are dying because these roots were never going to make it. From day one, they were too mouth-formed to possibly be able to support this tree. Yeah. Boy, that really harkens back to some visuals I've got even around here from trees that were either here when I moved in or I bought them and some somehow they got by me. But you can see that girdling root, even at the collar of the tree, where it's going into the soil, I mean, it's so girdled that even those top roots are right at the top strangling itself at the collar. Crazy. Yeah. And that comes, you know, that kind of goes back to that technical expertise, you have to excavate that and most people can't. And the reason it's there to begin with is because when you up-size in a nursery, you place a new pot, you cover it with mulch. So each of the up-sizing basically buries that root collar. But you know, here's where it gets kind of important at this conversation. We have so many tree planting efforts popping up all over the country. They're in suburban spaces, there is streambakes, they're doing ecological restoration. We really do need to be thinking about saplings. They're just, we can get a lot more in the ground and they require less maintenance. All the things that these organizations struggle with, like teaching them how to properly plant. And then after your volunteers go through and put a thousand trees in the city, who's going to water those trees? And who's going to prune them? And all these really challenging things that just go away. So I would say through the lens of needing to address environmental issues and help heal earth, we want to get as many native trees in the ground as possible. And we want them to live as long as possible. This is to me the very obvious path towards that goal. I'm on board, 1000%. And I think you've got a lot of people's attention. You had it from the first bullet point. I know we're going to get to this, but on behalf of my listeners, they like hearing cheap, fast establishment, lots of varieties, native options. Okay, where do I get these and how do I source this kind of stuff? This is usually a hiccup, but there's good news. So we've got most states will have a Forest Service that offers these trees on an annual basis. You can also buy from neighboring states if yours doesn't. I also recommend you are surely going to have at least some native nurseries in your state. And many native nurseries do saplings. That's like, for example, here in North Carolina, we have Mellow Marsh. And this is what they do, because they're often working. The people who want saplings are often doing ecological restoration projects. So they're kind of catering to that market anyway. And the other really cool thing about these nurseries is they can often ship these saplings. So unlike the big trees, that really can't be shit. Right. It's not difficult to bag up a bundle of 100 saplings, put them in sort of a wet bag, put it in a box and ship it to you. And they'll be just fine. Yeah. I was talking to you before we started recording about my experience with some saplings, the American chest nuts. And I was so excited to get them. And they were shipped to me as you just described, wrapped up in some brown paper, damp base around the roots, and they took off. Unfortunately, because they're American chestnuts that their life is limited no matter how aspirational you want to think they're going to be. But anyway, that's another story. But I experienced that. And I've seen many in the past from the different plantings I've been involved with here. So agree with you 100%. What a great way to access trees without having to leave your house to get them. Right. I mean, and there's other ways you're going to likely have a native plant society in your state. They'll have resources. I like the the native gardening subreddit. It's pretty massive. There's a lot of people there. And we can always just grow our own, which maybe we go there also. But it is so easy to grow trees. Let's do it. Well, that's a whole thing that's I think, worthy of discussion, which is this idea of just grow your own. You can, this was sort of the basis for our nonprofit. We started off again with the tree planting volunteer organizations here locally, and they were always limited by lack of budget. And this is when it occurred to us, well, why don't we just bypass that whole money situation for them? And we'll grow trees for them. And in the process, we want to push this idea of saplings, it'll make it easier on their volunteer side, easier on their maintenance side. So all of these things coalesce and we're like, okay, we know we want to grow these. And then we started digging around about good or best or healthy grow methodologies. And we found the air pruning boxes. Yeah. And this came from Edible Acres. He's a YouTube channel. Sean has this great YouTube channel. This is how he grows them. And we learned it from him. And they are so great. It's basically a wooden frame. Yeah. And you put a screen on the bottom, and you fill your frame with a substrate. We like to use rotted leaves that we get for free from City of Raleigh's leaf collection services. And then you scatter your seeds on top, put a little layer of leaves on top of that, maybe none. Yeah. We've had boxes yield 800 oaks in a 2x4 frame. It's just incredible. I'm looking at the picture in your book and you take a step by step with visuals. And I'm looking at this guy crouched down in front of these 2x4 boxes and there's just nothing but acorns wall to wall on the surface. I probably cut you off before you were going to tell me what happens next. Do you cover that up with a leaf mulcher? Is there a soil layer? Yeah. We could put a little bit on top, we usually do. And then those roots are going to start growing down and they're going to hit that mesh. Yeah. And when they hit the air, it actually causes them to stop growing down and instead grow sideways. They shoot roots off to the side of their main tips. And this is why the air pruning methodology gets its name. So the beauty of that is when you go to take those trees out, they detangle very easily and they have just perfect root structure. Wow. And they pick up all that beneficial fungi connection from the leaf mold, which is really powerful. Yeah. And you get not just a nice root, but it is loaded with aggregates. I mean, it's just like picking up a black chunk of soil because it's got so many aggregates, which are the fungi and the bacteria attaching to the root system. So I'm going to do this and I'm sure it's in your book and no doubt about that, but I'm just going to ask you since I have you here. So it's just the leaf mold over the acorns, for example. That's it. Yeah. A little layer. Your layer would be as deep as the seed is. So you kind of scale it bigger seed, smaller seeds. Okay. Yeah, it's amazing what you can do. And what we've ended up doing with this is turn into a nonprofit and we actually engage the community to collect seeds with us. And right now actually is the height of our seed collection. And we have hundreds of cool species down in our seed room and volunteers coming in, dropping them off. We have a team that processes them and gets them in beds. So we're filling out all of our beds right now. We're growing 10,000 plus trees at any given time and just making them openly available for the city, for nonprofits, for ecological restoration projects. It's just so cool. How many of these beds do you... I'm looking at the picture in the picture, there's a lot of them already, but how many are all the beds at your facility and how many are there? We have over 100. Sometimes we'll do boxes where we'll split halves or thirds if it's sort of a some rare species that you can't get many seeds. But typically it's a species of box. But yeah, 100 plus probably less than 125 more than 100, somewhere in that range. And when your volunteers are bringing them in, these people that are donating them, do they know what they're donating or are you identifying them once they get there? And are they seeds and acorns too? I mean, how... Well, for us, we really know the mission. What we're trying to do is connect people and trees more closely. So if somebody... We do have an intake form. If you know the species, we'd like to know, but we're not going to reject it because you don't know. A lot of people will... This might be their first encounter with trees. And we also do seed ID events as well to teach people how to ID the seeds and the trees. But the short of it is, we'll take it all. And then if we can't identify it, if we think it's... Sometimes we'll get like crepe myrtle or something, then we'll just compost it. The other thing is, it doesn't have to be a nonprofit. This is the kind of thing you can do in your backyard. And you can put many different seeds in the same bed. So especially if you're somebody who kind of already loves seeds anyway, or even thinking about it, maybe the person that has all the pots of random plants in your backyard, this is a super easy jump. And it's not hard to do. Section five of the book, which I think you already mentioned this, got a good help to plus videos for making these things are very easy. Wonderful. The people that have acorns sprouting up all over their yards, are they able to dig those up and put those into these boxes or elsewhere so that they continue to mature with that taproot that they dug up? You could definitely do that. Yeah. It isn't quite as good. We don't really do it. I would definitely say yes, you can. It might be that the roots are already pretty well developed at that point, even in a young tree. And it might be that they don't really take to the box, but it's certainly worth a try. Yeah. It's amazing how quickly that taproot gets down there before you even noticed that there's something growing above it. Especially the oaks. I've been amazed. I pulled one time a one year old white oak sapling just because I wanted to see the roots on this thing. And it was as long as my forearm and as thick as my index pinky finger, I was just blown away. Wow. Okay. Well, there's some testament to the deep taproot of the oak tree in a year's time. All right. I keep interrupting you on your roll here. You had a number of bullets. This is a great good. It should be. All right. Did we leave off on fast going and reliably establishable? Yeah. Yeah, we're kind of talking about the benefits. I think we hit most of them. Again, the main pushback being protection. You do have to protect them. Yeah. They're fragile in their early years against a mower or a deer. And there's some settings where they're going to never going to work. I mean, a children's playground, you have to plant a large tree there. There's no getting around it. But for most settings, it'll be great. And then once it's in the ground, the maintenance is pretty easy. You can water it if you want to or not. If you know, conditions are going to be tough and you're not going to do any maintenance, plant three in the same spot. And one of them is likely to make it. And then in its early years, ideally, if it's by itself, you would do some structural pruning to give it a nice, strong and tall trunk. It would be great if you could add wood chips every couple of years to help feed the soil. But these are not requirements. You don't see these generally sold at a nursery, a standard retail nursery. They're less common. Yeah. I have my thoughts on that. But why would you say that's the case? Part of it is the model is built on selling trees that have trademarks and plants that have trademarks because they have a higher margin. The idea is, you can't really command as high a margin on a white oak because it's a generic nut that you can find out in the wild. It has to be a trademark species. So that's part of it. I think that'll probably change a little bit in the coming years as this growing demand happens. But I don't think the retail nurses will necessarily be selling saplings. They'll still be probably containerized. I think it just fits the model. If nothing else, it's just status quo. It's what's been done. It's what will be done. You know, there's a trade-off back to some points we've already covered, but I just want to expand on a little bit. And that is, we go to a retail nursery because we want to see the tree we're going to bring home and we want to envision that in our yard and we can already get an idea or a sense of that when we're buying a 25-gallon oak tree, a red bud, or whatever it may be. But then we either have to plant it or we have to get somebody to plant it. And, you know, if you've dug a 25-gallon hole before, which really you need to dig about a 75-gallon hole to properly plant for a 25-gallon, anyway, my point is that makes me start to, my blood pressure's going up just thinking about that. We'll just remind us that you said a minute ago, you can plant 40 saplings in an hour. Give us the visual on how that happens. Yeah, it's so easy. You take a shovel, drive it straight in the ground, push it forward to create a little slot, and then you slot the roots in behind the back of the shovel, and then just use your foot to pat in the sides or use your hand to pat in the sides. It's super easy. And you're right, those trees are big. You've got to transport them, you've got to lift them, and then if you're doing it right, you do need to dig a hole that's two to three times the width. So there's a lot of effort there. You know, I had a note here about what about the downside, but you said really the only downside was you just have to kind of take care of them in the early years. Yeah, they need protection. But even this cage is, hopefully I'm not repeating myself, but they're reusable. So even if you spend the money on the cage, you can pull it out of rotation and reuse it again. So you're actually sort of investing in the asset. And especially if you're doing a lot of this work, maybe as a community or as a nonprofit or whatever that looks like, you just treat it as a revolving asset. And so therefore, it's not a huge lift. It's adding a cage, and then you just got to remember to come back in two or three years and collect your cages. If I'm planning it in an area where I know I'm never going to mow over it or step on it or anything like that, am I still protecting it for deer and critter browsing? No, I wouldn't. At that point, I might put a flag or a marker near it, just so you remember it was, but no, you don't need that. Okay. Talk about the benefit of saplings for providing some Keystone species solutions. That probably is a great application, not that there's any bad ones for saplings. Man, we understand how much important oaks are, right? Absolutely. Oaks are amazing. Oaks will grow in a lot less space than people think too. You need, you know, they say ideally 1500 to 2000 cubic feet for an oak or a large overstory like that. But that's a cubic measurement that goes down about two feet. So you kind of work backwards and you realize you can put an oak in a front yard. It doesn't have to be a large front yard. And not only that, with these saplings, you could actually fill up the whole space if you wanted to. So that's the other thing I just really love about working with saplings. And in places where you might have just put one tree or a couple and then have a bed that you have to keep maintaining, you could instead just fill the whole area with saplings. And that also forces the trees to compete, grow really well. They'll have some survivors and some that don't survive. But the ones that survive will be tightly interlocked. It's just a really cool way to maximize ecological healing in a space. Nice tip. I like that. So we're recording this right in the middle of fall, a great time to be thinking about or getting started with our tree planting and any planting because of the warm soil and the cool air. I'm assuming that you would say this is a great time to plant saplings. For sure. I mean, especially in the southeast, we get to plant from basically now through end of March, if we want to. I think the growing sense would be a little different for some of your readers, but in, sorry, listeners, but in general, there will be most people, this is a fantastic time to plant. So you having people showing up, you mentioned early on about how you'll just give them away to anybody and everybody that wants them. So what's the opportunity there to people just come and get free saplings? How does it work? Yes, it depends. So in the early years, we did tree giveaways. They're very logistically challenging and you can't move many trees. So now what we typically do is work through organizations. So we'll supply, it might be like, I don't know, a group that love plants and then they do their own distribution internally, or it might be an ecological restoration project. Like we're doing several of these with North Carolina Wildlife Federation. They are engaging their chapters to do some big replanting and then we'll supply them with just lots and lots of trees and shrubs. So we try to move big numbers now. It's just honestly easier. So given the numbers we work with. Sure. And it's not for the sake of moving those numbers. It's just we find that these partners need this plant material anyway, and they're doing great work. I mean, City of Raleigh, similar story, they're rethinking some of their grow practices and how they do, they have a nursery for, we have such a big park system and street system that they actually have their own nursery. So we're supplying them with some saplings that they're beginning to work with and rethink things. It's been really cool seeing all the ideas that Popforth wants, they're so abundantly available. That sounds exciting. I'm happy for you and I love that you're making those available in quantity to see those be planted out. Yeah, and there's another little nuance here that's worth noting. I think there's so much value that comes from this idea, whether it's a group of people or just an individual, but A, you're getting closer with trees and seeds, which is by itself interesting, but B, you're getting better at tree ID and getting these species grown because one of the biggest problems that we don't talk about much is there are a lot of big reforestation projects that either need to be done or have been slated to be done by the federal government or state government, and they're running into serious issues with plant material and with people who are qualified enough to be able to find seeds from a given species. So these are dying abilities or practices and we need people who can grow plant material in general, especially if we hope to reforest large tracts of lands. That will be a serious bottleneck. Why do you think that is? What's happening? Well, it already is a bottleneck. There's been some really interesting stories and alerts coming out of the US Forest Service about the limitations on reforestation because there's simply not enough plant material out there. There are not enough nurseries growing the native species of trees and shrubs needed for a given region. So the beauty of this work is A, bringing more people online to be able to do this work, but then also you can take these methodologies like the air pruning beds and you can go to a given site and find as many seeds as you can and begin growing out the plant material for that site with seeds collected from that site. And I think that specificity of genetics and growing what came from that literal site is hugely beneficial because we know there's a lot of variation on a given species across counties and state lines. Like a white oak here in Raleigh is just going to be super different from a white oak in New York. Soundlings are just like this fun entryway at every single level, whether you're collecting some seeds or fixing a forest. It's just like I just think they're the best. Me too. Gosh, I can't believe how quickly we got through that, but every selling point possible on the benefits of saplings, you got me on point one. And gosh, what a great conversation. And I want to ask you though, because other applications of saplings, for example, privacy screening or thickets or maybe Milwaukee Forest, I mean, tell me about some of the applications. Yeah, absolutely. When you're working with these saplings, it just opens up all these new possibilities. So that privacy thicket, you can call it a lot of things, a hedgerow, whatever. A hedgerow is sort of more of a British term, I think. But the way I want to imagine this is purely for privacy. This is a big need for lots of homeowners and businesses. They want a row of trees to create a green wall. And traditionally, the way this is done is using just one species and you plant it in a row. And that is inherently dangerous because if something hits that species, the pests, they're all going to die. We see this a lot with the Leland Cypress and the Rhys Barber Vitey. Yeah, both. Exactly. So what you do is instead of starting with these big containerized plants of the same species that you put in a row, you instead use a diversity of native shrubs. We don't want them to get too tall. And if you're okay with them getting tall, great. But we typically like to work with shrubs that max out around 20 feet or thereabouts and have at least 10 different species. We like to use 20, maybe a little more, but 10 is sufficient. And then you just load up that whole area, whatever the area that was going to hold the single line of trees, instead, fill it with saplings and spread them about two to three feet apart. They need a little space. I did fail to mention that you want to prep the area first. I always like to lay down either a layer of cardboard or we've actually been using brown paper recently, found that it's similarly effective and easier to carry around. And then add a nice layer of arbor switchips on top, at least six inches, go eight if you want, and let that sit for a couple of months before you start. Okay. Easy. Sorry for that backwards explanation. But yeah, then that bed's ready. And then you go plant your species two to three feet apart, fill the whole bed. I also recommend marking the plants. It's just very helpful to know, especially in a year, two or three scenario, it can sometimes get hard to tell what you planted and what blew in on the wind or something. Right. Have you seen anybody doing it for pocket forest? Yeah, that's the other application. So I think a lot of your listeners know about the Miyawaki method, which is really cool method. Love it. This is a different take on the method, which is less focused on soil preparation. Miyawaki puts a lot of focus there, and it's less rigorous on maintenance. And reason is because the amount of money and effort required to fully meet the Miyawaki method is really high. It's just not practical for most scenarios, working with a city or an ecological restoration project. Okay. So this is a very similar concept, which is plant a diversity of trees and shrubs two to three feet apart. But all we're doing for the prep is what I described earlier. We're going to lay down that cardboard or paper. We're going to put a six to eight inch layer of wood chips, let it sit for four months. That's just a lot less soil prep. That's a manageable workload. Indeed it is. Once you've got the trees installed, whether it's a pocket forest or a thicket, and the only difference there is what your species selection are. Okay. But once you've got your plants in the ground, and I mentioned before to mark them, and then you simply go through a couple of times in a growing season and pull out any competing trees or shrubs or vines that were not things that you planted. And if you've got, you know, speaking out of the professionals out there, if you've got a maintenance team, it's great because they don't have to be able to identify saplings. They just look to see what's marked or what's not marked. So you can have a standard landscape team take care of these, which is really important. And you do that for a couple of growing seasons, usually two growing seasons, but sometimes three. And by that point, your canopy will have filled in. And now it's going to be very hard for any competing tree or shrubs to make an entrance in that setting. Okay. And that reminded me to ask you one thing I did want to follow up on, and that was the pruning part. So these saplings have been, you know, one through one to three years old or so by then, even at one year, have they started branching out a bit? A little bit. Yeah. I don't normally worry about it too much at year one. Probably year three is about where I start thinking about structure. Okay. And for structure, the name of the game is pretty straightforward. It's you're attempting to train this tree to have a single dominant trunk with well spaced branches. As with anything, it gets way more complicated on you doing the work. But, you know, at the risk of plugging my book too much, it's in the book. There's a lot of good instructions on how to do that. Plug away, man. It's a great book. I want everybody to read it. That's why I recommended it in my elite list of 17 books of just last week or two. And I love it. And I'm glad that you have it in there for sharing so generously. Yeah, thank you. I want to mention one other thing that's just sort of a fun little bit of a new thing happening in the world of reforestation. There's this new methodology that's getting some good peer reviewed research called applied nucleation. And using this concept that I've just described, we prepare with the cardboard and the wood chips and we're using saplings, everything I've just talked about, you will plant an island of in the middle of a deforested area, or maybe you're actually bringing a forest back where there hasn't been one in a very long time, but you plant your island and then the island grows up and begins seeding out naturally and it fills an area. So you're not having to actually physically plant every square inch of that old forest or whatever it may have been. Wow. Yeah, they're finding it to be quite effective, especially in terms of keeping a very high diversity of species. I could get a little too far in the rabbit hole and I'll take that risk here for a second, but you've got what are called pioneer species. They do well in the early stages of where a field transitions to forest. And then you have what are called a successional species and climax species, which do well later. So in a typical reforestation method, your early pioneer species are going to do really well and a lot of your late species are going to die out. But by planting it tight using two to three foot spacing in this applied nucleation methodology, the pioneers grow up quickly and they provide shade and a lot of the later successional species will actually survive. It's a kinder climate for them. So they are able to make an entrance sooner and we can bypass lots of years of ecological succession by having them there sooner. That's very interesting. Has this been a process that's been going on for a short period of time? It sounds like it's kind of new to the game. I think it's the last, you know, I don't actually have a precise question to answer, but I get the impression it's about 30 years or so. Oh. Because there's some good peer reviewed research that's been emerging. You need some time to get the results back. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I'm glad you went down that rabbit hole. That's very interesting. And for us, that's exactly where we want you to go. You know, I would say, depending on the listener, there's a lot of fun ways to enter the work. If you're just really strictly aimed at your yard, this might be a fun substitute for buying those big trees and now you know the benefits. If you're involved in your community garden club or your community garden growing space, this could be a fun new addition to work you're already doing. Yeah. If you're a non-profit, this is a, you know, in the world of trees or ecological restoration, this is a really fun approach using the air pruning beds. Municipalities can use this to engage their citizens and help with street tree planting efforts and take budgets further. So I think there's just, honestly, there's a sapling for every occasion. That's a new slogan. I'm going to get a t-shirt with that on there. Is that okay with you? That sounds great. I'll buy that shirt. You got it. Well, that was a lot of information in a short time. In fact, a fun side story related to this exactly. That is, we recorded this episode on a Friday afternoon. Basil had just come in from a full day of work and rushing to get to the interview time. But this topic of saplings is such a passion of his. He just loves talking about it and he couldn't wait for the interview. And in fact, on Saturday morning, apparently he had been replaying the conversation back in his head a few times and emailed me worried that the conversation went too fast because he was so excited to talk about the subject matter that he just kind of spewed out a lot of information before we really had a chance to get into the dialogue. And he wanted to do it over if I felt that that was necessary. But I assured him I did not think that was the case. There was a lot of great information. We captured it and in re-listening myself, we certainly did and no need to record that. But I appreciate him even offering to do that. That's the kind of guy he is. Now, you already probably know this, but you can check out the show notes and re-listen to this episode from our website at joegardner.com. Look for the podcast tab. And this is episode number 442. So there we'll have relevant links and pictures. But you can also watch Basil and me have this very conversation that you just got through listening to on our YouTube channel, which is Joe Gardner TV. All of our podcasts are now being uploaded there as well. So if you like watching as you listen, now you can. And for me as a visual learner, that is especially helpful because we will always try to add relevant visuals when we're able to enhance what the discussion is currently about in that moment. And again, that's all at youtube.com slash joegardner TV. Also, by the way, all of our growing and greener world television episodes are free to watch on YouTube. And that channel, covering all 12 seasons of our episodes, is at youtube.com slash ggwtv. And that's for growing and greener world TV. So happy watching and probably a great way to spend some time as we're coming into the colder seasons where you just kind of want to stay inside and watch some gardening content. And I think this would be a great choice for doing just that. Now I had a very exciting webinar announcement for our next event happening on November 19th. If you've ever walked out into your garden and found your favorite plants nibbled to the ground overnight, I can raise my hand to that, you know that sinking feeling. Deer, rabbits, groundhogs, they all seem to think that our gardens are there all you can eat buffet. But here's the good news. There is a better way to deal with it. On Wednesday, November 19th at noon Eastern time, I'm teaming up with my friend Nancy Lawson, author of the Humane Gardener and Wildscape for a live online webinar called Who's Nibbling in Your Garden? Coexisting with Deer and Other Mammals. Nancy is one of the most knowledgeable and respected voices when it comes to understanding the why behind the wildlife behavior and she's sharing practical science-based ways to protect your plants without harming the animals or the ecosystem that supports them. It's a 90-minute session packed with insight solutions and a new way of looking at your garden through an ecological lens. Plus there'll be time for live Q&A at the end. Plus you'll get access to the replay and extra resources afterwards. Tickets are just $30 for this event. So consider joining a space is limited but together let's learn how to take that frustration into understanding and grow a garden that works with nature, not against it. Just head to joegardener.com slash deer to register. That's joegardener.com slash deer and I hope to see you there. And that's going to be a wrap for today. Thanks as always to Amy Prentiss, Brendan O'Reilly, and Christine Lafond. And thank you for joining me today. My goal for every episode is to help you take the guesswork out of gardening by teaching you the why do behind the how to so that you can become a better, smarter, more confident gardener. I'll be back here again next Thursday for another episode of The Joe Gardener Show and I look forward to having you right back here to join me for that. Until then, have a great week, take care, and I'll see you back here really soon. Thanks for listening to The Joe Gardener Show, the podcast where it's all about gardening and learning to grow like a pro, no experience required. For more information, podcasts, and how to videos, visit us online at joegardener.com.