Tree Nursery Activities at Haribon's Buhay Punlaan

As part of our Social Innovation initiative at work, I recently organized what are called Tree Nursery activities in partnership with Haribon. Exactly what are tree nursery activities? Well, during tree planting, you have all these seedlings in bags of soil and volunteers carefully move the seedlings out of the bags into the ground to plant them. Obviously, the seedlings don't get into these bags of soil themselves. :) I wanted to organize a couple of activities over the summer months and it made sense to do something in the area of environmental sustainability since Earth Day is on April 22. However, tree planting season doesn't start until June because planting seedlings during the intense summer heat will result in most of the seedlings drying up and dying. After talking to Haribon about possible activities, we decided to do these nursery activities in Buhay Punlaan in the Caliraya Watershed.

I ended up organizing two of these: one in April and another in May. The April event was a bit of a disaster that all stemmed from the fact that our bus broke down. It took a while for our new transport to arrive which meant we lost almost an hour and a half. This delay caused us to leave the venue quite late which also meant that we got caught up in the late afternoon rush in Los Banos and Calamba, which caused us to lose an additional hour and a half by being stuck in heavy traffic. It was definitely not a pleasant experience. At least everyone who attended seemed to enjoy the actual tree nursery activities which included re-bagging seedlings that were in damaged bags and removing weeds and vines from trees that were already planted in the reforestation area behind the nursery.

We learned a lot from this first experience so the second event in May ran a whole lot more smoothly. We left practically on time and returned to Manila a bit ahead of schedule as well. We also had a wider variety of activities. Haribon kicked off with a talk about reforestation and the importance of repopulating our forests with indigenous tree species. The folks from Buhay Punlaan then gave us a tour of the different nursery areas. Then we started the actual volunteer activities. First, volunteers started filling bags with a mixture of soil and rice husks.

Afterwards, we headed out to the forest for wildlings collection. A wildling is kind of a baby tree that has started growing in the wild. You might think it strange for us to take a wildling that has already started growing from its natural habitat. However, as these wildlings start growing, their chances of survival diminish since there are too many of them in the same small space (I think I gathered something like 30 wildlings from an area of about one square foot alone!) and later on, when the grow and need more sunlight and nutrients from the soil, they start competing and losing out to the taller trees in the area. Once we were done collecting wildlings - and we did collect a whole lot of them - we headed back to the nusery area where we started putting these wildlings into the bags of soil.

It was my first time to be involved in these tree planting "preparation" activities and it's quite gratifying to know that I have now been involved in practically the end-to-end process of tree planting. I have now prepared bags of soil, gathered wildlings, put the wildlings into these bags of soil, performed rebagging for seedlings that were in damaged bags, done the actual tree planting, and even removed weeds and vines from trees that have been planted in the reforestation area. Cool!