Coming together as a group and working with the community to promote clean air, clean water, and a better environment for all the public to enjoy was a great experience for the “Fly Fishes”. In learning how to plant trees properly into the ground and coming together with other pertinent members of “Friends with trees”, I received great insight on how trees reduce the amount of storm water flowing into storm drains through interception, infiltration and transpiration. This helps absorb and clean storm water runoff before it reaches Burnt Bridge Creek and the Columbia River. An evergreen tree can intercept more than 4,000 gallons of water a year, while a mature deciduous tree intercepts 500 to 760 gallons. As a subdivision in the larger group our team planted roughly 13 trees into the community and as a whole more than 40 trees including Black Tupelo’s, Autumn Purple Ashe’s and Galaxy Magnolia’s.
Friends of Tress have a very high success rate in having a tree take root and survive through its life. In part because they are well practiced and make sure that every group member knows exactly how to plant trees so that it survives with a hands on demonstration. One of the difficulties in planting the trees was to make sure that the top biggest root was just at ground level as this is one of the most important things to follow for the trees survival. Any lower or higher reduces the likelihood of the tree surviving drastically so digging and refilling the holes as to match and make it perfect height for each individual tree was tough. We had to come together as a group to get the measurements right and this did get frustrating at times. Mostly because it was freezing cold, this made