CO2...

CO₂...

Since sometime last summer I've been working on a project at work that I'm very excited about. In 1992 we moved our business to the industrial park. At the time we signed a five year lease and put up an office building on a 2 acre plot. Our building and parking lot took up the front half and we figured maybe someday we'd do something with the back acre. (It is the brown square in the upper right corner of the picture. That picture is taken in early spring from Steve's 'copter.) We talked about mowing and seeding it for a soccer field, but that was mostly in jest, and for the last sixteen years that field has grown weeds and scrub brush. Pretty ugly, as you can see below.

That space has bugged me for years, and many days this summer I took my lunch out to the picnic table we have in the back of the building and I'd look at this space. It just seemed to be calling out for some trees.

I thought of going to the local tree nursery and buying a handful of good sized trees and plopping them in. But taking care of them - making sure they were kept watered and didn't get overrun with weeds - was intimidating. And I thought of getting a handful of seedlings from the Arbor Day foundation, but the same issues were there.

At some point I got to wondering if there were any state government resources that could help me figure out what to do. A few minutes in Google turned up the forestry department at Purdue. I picked a name at random from the list of professors / foresters and sent an email explaining my situation. Amazingly I heard back from him in a day or two, but he said he couldn't help me. But maybe the person he copied on his reply could... And in a day or two she wrote me back and said she couldn't help, but maybe the person she copied could help... This went on for a couple iterations until someone wrote and said "Did you know that your town has a city forester and a tree board, and they'd be delighted to help?"

Of course I didn't know that, but when I found out the forester's name, I knew him. (If you didn't know this, let me be the first to inform you that I live in a small town.) So I called Aaron up and he was out that afternoon to talk over my plan.

His advice was to mow it and plant seedlings. Seedlings require less water than big trees, and the idea is to over plant and let the best ones survive. For a while I considered planting them myself, but I found a local tree planter who will do them for me and the price is right.

So back in August we ordered 300 white pine, 100 oak, 100 black cherry and 100 tulip tree seedlings. They cost only about $38 per hundred (from the state nursery). We had the field mowed - actually bush-hogged - and the planter came in a week later and sprayed a herbicide where he will plant. The state will deliver the seedlings in March and they'll go in the ground as soon after that as we can get them in.

The whole project is costing less than $2K, plus a couple hundred for the first 5 or 10 years to keep it mowed every summer. It seems like a pretty good price for a one acre woods.

Of course part of the goal here is to do something about CO₂. It turns out that according to this article, I'm planting almost exactly the right amount of trees to offset my lifetime CO₂ generating activities.

That feels pretty good. According to this story, there are 61 trees for every human on the planet. I'm doing something to up that ratio, but we need to plant lots more.

If you know anyone with a vacant lot, talk to them about putting trees on it.

Incidentally - there seem to be no tax breaks or incentives for a small project like this on private land. I think that is a mistake.