A green wall, eventually

So, at the front of our property is a stand of pine trees and we wanted to extend it across the whole front of the property. Jeremy found out from someone at work that you can get relatively cheap seedling trees through the Virginia Department of Forestry. They are primarily for reforesting vast areas, but they do sell smaller quantities (we certainly don't need 1000 of anything). We then looked at a bunch of pictures of conifers online and he decided he likes what we have. VA DoF also sells various deciduous trees, but we don't really want any more leaves in the fall. Plus, we want to use them as a screen, so year-round greenery would be good. I told him I thought what we have is Pinus strobus, or Eastern white pine. He took some convincing, but finally came around. Turns out the DoF sells them. We ordered 10, at a whopping $2 a piece. They came on Tuesday, 5/1.

 

 

They even came with instructions on how to plant them.

We did not use a hoedad or dibble to plant ours, though the instructions conveniently give more specific information on those particular implements.

 And on 5/2 we planted them up, using a plain old shovel.

I guess they're a little hard to see, but we did two staggered rows of 5 each across the front. If you click on the last pic to biggerfy it, you can see the back row pretty well. The back row actually ended up with 6, as they sent us 11 trees. I hope they grow big and strong, quickly!