During the holidays our customers and vendors send Holiday cards and gifts for our employees to enjoy. This year one of our corrugated vendors, Tharco, dropped off four adorable Christmas Trees which we displayed in our front office for the Holidays!
After the Holidays passed our little festive trees had to come down. However, the trees were so well maintained that the soil and branches were still fresh, so we decided to extend their life by planting them on our property at Valley Box.
Our first challenge was to find out what was the best way to transplant and care for young pine trees. We were concerned that the hot summer sun in Santee would be too intense for these little saplings. Luckily, we stumbled across Lovett Pinetum which had easy to follow directions on how to:
- Prepare the planting site
- Handle the saplings
- Plant the young tree
- Maintain the tree
- Watering
- and Pruning
Kymberly Bennett, Alicia Eschwege and Fabie Estrada got together on their lunch break and dug 4 holes, removed the trees from their plastic container, made sure to break up the root ball, planted the trees in their new home, filled in the hole with dirt allowing a "moat" to remain and finished by giving them plenty of water! "It took no time at all! I'm glad these trees can go on living for years, rather than being thrown away," said Alicia Eschwege.
Just in case the trees don't receive enough water we decided to supplement with a product called DRiWATER® we learned about working with The San Diego River Park Foundation, who we partnered with in April 2012 to plant trees native to the Peutz Creek Preserve.
DRiWATER® is made from 98% potable water and 2% food grade ingredients. These ingredients bind the water into a solid gel. When the gel comes in contact with naturally occurring enzymes in soil, the enzymes slowly break down the gel, releasing moisture into the soil delivering moisture to plants between 40 and 90 days. This way we don’t have to worry about having a direct drip line on the plant in the beginning stages of their transplanting.
