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Comment by Hitton | Hacker News Reader

Seems a bit suspicious to me. You can't plant a tree in 5 minutes while making sure that it will actually keep growing.

How so? When replanting clear cuts here in Sweden with pine or fir each tree takes a few seconds to plant - you stamp your tool in to the ground which makes a hole, drop the plant down, stomp the ground and then your off to the next. There is also no need to tend to them afterwards (except treatment to deter deer/elks).

Which is a scattergun approach, no? What's the survival rate? I'd guess 1:100 if you're not tending them.

But, in Ethiopia many of those trees are going to need watering, surely? Protecting from people gathering firewood?

Sweden and Ethiopia seem pretty different wrt tree planting?

Definitely a scattergun approach but that’s similar to how nature does it, I’ve heard the survival rate for seedlings in north American confirer forests to be about 1:1,000,000.

Is that for natural or manual (eg from helicopter) scattering?

Natural. Each year a forest may produce hundreds of millions of seeds but only a few thousand saplings survive.

You do it like this https://youtu.be/VbBDX9ySk60 , 80-90% survival rate is common

These are likely bareroot "whips" which makes planting a lot more automatable and successful, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfI_T7qG_Ok

It's pretty quick to plant bare-root seedlings using a spade or "dibble". About 45 years ago another Boy Scout and I planted approximately 1,000 pine seedlings on a tree farm in a single day using a variant of the method shown in [1]. Once we got a rhythm going we planted around 3 trees per minute.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhqa3yeLxhk

Ofcourse you can. In summer Jobs while at school , planting 100 trees in an hour is pretty doable.

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