My tree story is about a Ponderosa pine that I planted and over 200 trees of different varieties. I purchased the seventeen acres of land outside the Wisconsin Dells and it had tillable land, but it also had a lot of trees. I wanted to kind of make a forest, you know, especially around where my trailer was. So I joined the Arbor Society, and every time you spent your membership fee they would send you ten trees or shrubberies, whatever you picked. So I picked 10 trees and I planted them, and some of them survived, some of them didn't, so then I decided well I would like Ponderosa pines. Ponderosa pines are not really successful in Wisconsin I found out later, you know. So I bought these, I got ten Ponderosa pines from the Arbor Society. They came there with little twigs about this time when I planted ten of them: four, three, three. And one of them died but the other ones, they're still alive and I planted them in 2006, and the front three grew up pretty good. The middle three are kind of suffering, and the back three they grew tall, but they got no pines on them, no needles on them hardly, I got to cut them down. They're just little circles, the other ones are bigger. I also bought over 200 trees from the Sauk County environmental thing they said special deal on them so I went about and plantin' 200 trees and one or two days is just a near-impossible. So my cousin came over to help me, and I think we have a survival rate of about 25 out of 200 that I planted but I had big aspirations but now I think you've got to do more research and you got to know how to plant your trees. That's what I learned because I think I made many mistakes, especially on the water.
