Install Day with Tree-Vitalize

Emily, Liz, and David on Phil Elena St. in Philadlephia. Liz just finished demonstrating her "root massaging" technique on a tree that Charlie Brown would really appreciate.  We want to hire Liz to plant all our trees with love.

Today we helped to plant trees in the Germantown and Mount Airy neighborhoods in Philadelphia with The TreeVitalize Philadelphia Tree Planting Program.  You can check out an older blog of ours that talks about TreeVitalize and its relationship to the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society. It was a cold and drizzly day but our Group, Group G, (the Groups went from A to H) finished in record time and therefore usurped the name Group (a).

David and Liz hard at work at our sidewalk street planting condition. 

We followed the lead of our veteran TreeVitalize planters David and Liz who have a combined 20 years of tree planting experience with the program as well as training from the Philadelphia Horticulture Society (PHS).  We offered our thoughts from time to time but mostly wanted to observe the process and get a feel for how PHS likes to plant trees.  


The trees were bareroot and tiny so we did end up staking them.  Jim urban might not approve, but the idea is that these trees are so thin (1 1/2" caliper max) that the presence of the stakes helps to make them visible.  Our friends at TreeVitalize assure us that they lose more trees to vehicle encounters because often people don't notice until it is too late.  We will be monitoring our trees and maybe even install a Gator bag if we feel like the homeowner needs a little help with the maintenance. 


The Tree Tenders program at PHS seems like it is more than effective with their training and in fact we are planning on attending one of their sessions to get a more in depth exposure to the PHS method.