Hit my 500th tree planting this week, a little surprised by that number

I do mostly removals and pruning for a small crew outside Portland, so planting was never my main thing. But over the last 6 years, I kept a simple tally in my phone every time we put a new tree in the ground. This Tuesday we did a row of 12 red maples along a school driveway, and when I added them up, it came to exactly 500. That number took me back a bit. It doesn't sound like a lot compared to some nurseries, but for someone who started out just dragging brush, it feels like a real milestone. More importantly, about 40 of those were replacements for trees we took down that were sick or dying, so it's nice to think we're giving something back on the same streets. How do you all track your planting numbers, or do you just let the invoices do the talking? I'm thinking about making a small map of all 500 spots before I forget half of them.

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umathompson1mo ago

Tbh, the 40 replacements part stuck out to me. That is the quiet kind of math most people never see, the part where you undid some damage you were part of. But here’s the question I gotta ask: out of those 500, how many actually made it past the first two years? Because drought and deer and bad soil kill a ton of saplings around here, and I wonder if your tally is counting trees that are still alive or just trees that went in the ground.