Tree Me Amadeus

Posted On April 19, 2026

My 2026 Arbor Day Story

It’s become a Monroe Wildlife Area tradition. Each spring the month of April is tree planting season. 2026, however, I vowed would in one key way be different. With three decades of past years’ plantings established in ground, I was going to significantly cut back my numbers this year, due in large part to the fact that I was simply running out of space. 2026 was finally going to be the year I could enjoy the fruits of past labors more, and plant less.

Of course, when it comes to my history of tree planting endeavors, “less” is a totally relative term. Planning each year’s spring tree planting begins in February. That’s when our Soil & Conservation District’s tree planting availabilty list comes out & mandatory pre-orders are due. So, when the 2026 order form came out, this year for the first time, not as a mailer, but totally on line, instead of the one hundred or more bare root conifers I normally order, THIS year I was going to hold myself to twenty each white pine & Norway spruce for a total of forty.

Then as I browsed down the list, I saw they had bareroot serviceberry & elderberry seedlings available. Since I’ve had some luck with elderberry in the past & birds love them, & serviceberry made my list last fall as a wildlife friendly edible berry, I odered a bundle of each. Of course, they only came in bundles of twenty five. So, “Okay.” I said to myself. “Cutting back this year” means ninety is the definition of “less”.”

Then, as March neared its conclusion and most of winter’s snow disappeared, I began thinking about apples. Each year I make it my goal to add half a dozen apple trees of various varieties to my efforts at establishing orchards. So I went out one morning to scout garden centers at our local Home Depot, Tractor Supply & Lowes, knowing full well that my tree planting competition was stiff & if I hestitated in the slightest, by mid-April, the best trees would be gone.

My first stop was Tractor Supply. I hit paydirt immediately. They didn’t even have them out yet, but out on the side of their warehouse, they must just have unloaded them, still on the pallets, I spotted the pots. Now at this juncture, I feel compelled to point out, there is an egregious tree scandal ongoing in our area. This is the north country. Winter’s are long & hard, with temperatures and wind chills that frequently get down into the -20F/-30F range, and even colder, with windchills. And while USDA maps list New York State’s north country as zone 3 or zone 4, here along Lake Ontario’s eastern shores, we are more realistically what I like to call “Lake Effect Zone 2.5”. If it won’t grow in Alberta Canada, it ain’t growin’ here.

Yet, despite this very real truth, most of the trees local garden centers activey sell trees are rated for zones 4 or 5. I even see many rated as high as recommended for USDA growing zones 7-9. Peddling those trees in the north country should be a crime.

However, in and amongst the various USDA zone 5-9 rated fruit tree varieties, I found 6 nice “cold hardy” zone 3 apple sapplings in McIntosh, Jonathan & Honeycrisp varieties. In addition, while I was browsing the lot, I found 3 really nice autumn blaze red maples. Since I had promised my daugher Abby I would help her plant a property line tree border along one side of her newly purchased home, I added them to my haul.

So, with nine potted sapplings on hand and ninety bare root seedlings inbound, I could have called it a day and been satisfied, but of course, true to form, I didn’t and wasn’t. Instead, I unloaded those nine trees and immediately went back out, telling my wife “If Tractor Supply has their trees in already, so does everyone else.”

As it turned out, my instincts were right. Next stop, Home Depot, where another big score awaited me in the form of nineteen 6-8 foot tall Canadian nursery grown extreme cold hardy USDA rated Zone 2 Wolf River apple saplings.

I’ve had good luck so far growing Wolf River apples on my land, & our local garden centers don’t have them every year. So I bought all of them. Now I had 118 trees to put in the ground.

Was I done?

Nope.

I unloaded those Wolf Rivers and went back out once again, this time to Lowes. Lowes had a lot of zone 4-9 apple & fruit trees on hand, the sort of trees I long ago gave up trying to grow and avoid like the plague. They did, however, have four nice zone 2 rated crabapples, and since my Monroe Wildlife Area’s frozen fermented crabapples had proven to be a big mid-winter wild turkey and whitetail deer forage draw, I bought them all. When the dust finally settled, my 2026 definition of “less” now stood at one hundred and twenty two potted trees and bare root seedlings of various types and varieties to put in the ground.

My Soil & Conservation bare root seedlings had to be picked up on Friday, April 10th. My plan was to get as many apple trees in the ground ahead of that as I could. The weather, however, refused to cooperate. Early April was frigid. So cold in fact, that I ended up storing my thirty two apple & red maple saplings in my garage to protect their nursery formed buds from freeze or frost damage.

It finally warmed up and quit raining and snowing enough on April 8th that I was able to get 8 apples planted in my side yard’s main apple orchard. I had planned on putting in another batch the following day, but an unpredicted spring snowstorm dump got in my way.

So, on April 10th, I drove over to our local Soil & Conservation district office, where I picked up what I thought was my bare root seedling order: Twenty each white pine & Norway spruce, twenty five each service berry & elderberry bare roots. The folks there filled my order & loaded them into the tote bin in the bed of my truck. It was pouring rain outside, but I was in & out of there in twenty minutes without ever having to get out of my truck.

The weather cleared a bit that afternoon, so I began planting. My plan was to focus on the white pines & Norway spruce, then plant the berries before returning to apples as I wanted to get all of my bare root trees in the ground first.

I changed into my tree planting duds, loaded the first bundles of white pine & Norways in a bucket and grabbed my shovel.

My Friday afternoon goal was twenty seedling trees in the ground. I knew the white pines would take longer, as I had to cage each of them, otherwise I was doing nothing but putting out snacks for the deer.

I opened the bundles and put about the first ten trees in the ground. The white pines were smaller than I had expected. I’d ordered 3 year old bare root transplants. These trees seemed smaller. I soon learned why. As I mapped out my planting plan in my head, I counted the remaining white pines in my bucket, expecting there to be five. Instead, there were twenty.

Well, that explained it. I suddenly realized what had happened. Instead of three year old bare root transplants in two bundles of ten, the folks at soil & conservation had given me bundles of twenty five two year old bare root seedlings, which was why they were so small.

I immediately trudged back to the house, where I opened & counted the other white pine bundle. Sure enough, it also held twenty five. So now, instead of the 90 total bare root tree seedlings I had planned on, I had 120. My 2026 plan for “less” had exploded to “more”.

I momentarily contemplated contacting Soil & Conservation and making an effort to rectify my order. However, I already had five of them planted, and by that time it was late Friday afternoon and by the time I could get those five back out of the ground and get to their office, they would most likely be closed. So, since the pricing on each type of bundle was nearly the same, and the Soil & Conservation folks had gone out of their way to emphasize that they had no extra trees for sale and all orders had to be picked up by COB that same day, I determined that the likelihood of anything productive coming of such an effort on my part were nil, or close to it. SoI decided that what I was given was what I had. I would simply have to adjust my plan & keep planting.

I managed to get all of the conifers in the ground over the weekend. Fifty white pines, planted and caged, plus twenty bare root Norway spruce.

Seventy bare root trees in three days. I used the extra white pines to replace previously planted seedlings that hadn’t made it through last summer’s drought.

I also made time to extricate 4 Norway spruce from last year’s plantings that were clearly struggling. They were alive but gasping for breath. I knew I was responsible for their plight, having chosen poorly drained spots. It was almost as if I could hear them pleading with me for their lives. So I dug them up gently and put them up near the house in some good dirt in pots. A new mission for me: “Tree Rescue Ops.”

While I was at it, I also potted the half dozen smallest white pine seedlings. They had such minimal root growth, it just seemed to me that putting them in the ground at this point was useless. Growing these 6 bare roots to size in pots for a year or two will be another experiment.

So by Monday, April 13th, I was down to fifty bare root service berry & elderberry seedlings. They went in easy. I put them in the pond bottom sludge piles I had dredged from my swamp pond the previous summer. There was a Canada goose nesting there pondside. I made sure to give her wide berth.

In those pondside piles of good black pond muck, I was able to plant all of the service & elderberries in groupings of 10 in a couple of hours. Hopefully they will flourish there and provide bountiful berries for the Monroe Wildlife Area’s contingent of wood ducks, hooded mergansers, turkeys & songbirds.

With all my bare roots in the ground, I returned to planting apples. I had two remotes sites picked out where I planted groupings of three; two Wolf Rivers & one Jonathan each. The task of planting trees in a remote site in April is daunting. The ground is too saturated for my tractor & trailer. Each tree requires two bags of dirt, a full bag of mulch, 4 anchor rocks (to keep the tree from getting wind uprooted) and a tree guard, all of which I had to hand carry to the planting site, in addition to a shovel and the potted 7 foot sapling itself. As a result, simply staging the necessary materials for a remote multi tree planting is a day’s work all by itself.

However, by Friday, I had six more apple trees planted and the materials staged for planting four more.

On Saturday, I took a detour from planting apples to help my daughter plant her three property line border red maples.

Whilst I was there, we also installed a pair of PAW Patrol cedar signs I had made for her & her pups, did some trail work, and went shrub shopping for lilac bushes to fill in her border and complement her maples.

I was going to plant more apples today, Sunday April 19th, but once again it snowed. So at this juncture I have 17 apple saplings remaining.

Materials are staged for planting four of them. Ten more will go into two new rows in my side yard main orchard. In anticipation of having to replace two or three due to last year’s drought, I’m holding the last three in reserve. I plan on completing this year’s tree planting just in time for spring turkey season.

No matter the outcome of this year’s Monroe Wildlife Area tree planting endeavors, there is one thing of which I’m quite certain:

NO ONE had Falco’s“Rock Me Amadeus” in their Final Four bracket as Adirondack Outlaw’s tree planting motivational song. (YouTube Link below): https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=0432e92c2975eee8d56ff09e8f22c1ad5728030e1db564cdee1e0f3b042fc70cJmltdHM9MTc3NjU1NjgwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=1c5de283-1325-6d0e-1492-f5c312e56c8f&u=a1L3ZpZGVvcy9yaXZlcnZpZXcvcmVsYXRlZHZpZGVvP3E9cm9jayttZSthbWFkZXVzJiZtaWQ9MUI1NUQ5QTcxNjg1QkU0NTc0QUIxQjU1RDlBNzE2ODVCRTQ1NzRBQiZjaHVybD1odHRwcyUzYSUyZiUyZnd3dy55b3V0dWJlLmNvbSUyZmNoYW5uZWwlMmZVQ1VpbXFQM2piS29NQnhkM1k3MlBXUUEmRk9STT1WQU1HWkM

Maybe next year “less” will actually mean “less” and not “more”.

Then again, maybe I’ll throw caution to the wind & say:

“Tree Me Amadeus”

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Until Our Trails Cross Again:

ADKO