Spring Chores

The recent time change has sent this body into a bit a spin. Aside from the loss of sleep which seems to a continual event, the time is drawing near for strenuous outdoor activities such as checking fences, picking up dead fall and removing old vegetation (including all the dead spruce and pine from last year's drought). With in a month's time, the activity will be fever pitched as the new trees arrive from nurseries and will need to be planted to avoid loss.
At our farm, this is the time for a lot of short tempers, broken equipment, and lots of bad weather.
It is very common event that best laid plans are thrown out the window and pandemonium wins the day. We have never not gotten through a planting season, however, we have had some close calls. As a result of one such near catastrophe, we started to incorporate bucket planting. We contacted a couple of landscape firms who were throwing away perfectly good 7 - 10 gallon buckets. On the open market (nursery and garden centers), those buckets are about $5 each so if you hire landscapers, ask to keep the planter buckets. They are good for starting all sorts of plants.
One the spring chores that I will have is to go down to the shed and pull out buckets and get them ready for planting. We have found that bucket planting takes a great deal of risk and loss out of the planting equation. We have a mulch soil mix brought in and we add pine fines to it in order to allow the roots to have maximum spread and density. We do a spring planting of last year's buckets using a 12" auger on a tractor, which by the way, is the same diameter as the 7-10 gallon buckets. Once that is done, we have a buckets ready to go for next spring.