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Arbor Day Foundation
Arbor Day in the US falls on the last Friday in April, through some states have it on a slightly different date to account for planting conditions. (planting before the last frost or during the dry season obviously doesn't work too well!) Quite a few countries around the world celebrate it under a different name. So what's the holiday about? Planting trees! Arbor Day in the US originally started in Nebraska, part of the great plains. The great treeless plains... The plains were fine when they were intact grasses, but once plowing began the steady winds blowing across the plains started stripping the soil. To hold the soil in place, settlers started planting trees as windbreaks. Many Great Plains states that had stripped the ground bare with deep plowing had all their top soil blow away during the ten year drought in the 1930s known as the Great Dust Bowl. Nebraska suffered less than most states due to the numbers of trees planted as windbreaks in the years since they'd first declared Arbor Day a state holiday in 1885. Planting trees as windbreaks was funded by the US government for years after the disaster of the Dust Bowl to try and prevent it from happening again. With temperatures rising and much of the US in a prolonged drought, tree planting is still one of the best ways to ensure we don't have a repeat of the Dust Bowl. In addition to slowing winds, the roots anchor the soil, and the leaf canopy slows down falling rain (when it finally comes) so it soaks into the ground rather than running off hardpan and causing flash flooding. Plus of course the benefits of providing shade, absorbing CO2, improving air quality, and reducing nearby buildings heating and cooling costs. More fun facts:
One tree produces 260 pounds of oxygen every year.
Over a 50 year life, a tree can control $31,000 worth of soil erosion.
An acre of trees removes 2.6 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year The National Arbor Day Foundation is a charity that plants trees and provides educational programs about the environmental roles of trees. For a $10 donation, you can get 10 6-12" trees mailed to you. There's a variety of packages available to suit your climate zone. There's also an option to get 10 trees designed to feed and attract birds. For $20 you can get 3 hazelnut bushes from their research field. They are even better at absorbing CO2 than similar sized trees, plus provides nuts for you or the local wildlife. Enterprise Rent-a-Car also choose the National Arbor Day Foundation for an endowment to celebrate their 50th anniversary, a pledge to plant 50 million trees over the next 50 years in the National Forests. This amounts to planting roughly enough trees to cover Central Park in New York... every ten days for the next fifty years. That's a lot of trees! Some of these trees will actually be planted outside the US in areas devastated by wildfires, including parts of British Columbia (Canada) and Scotland.
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Contributor's Note
I have really nice 20' trees in the yard that came from an Arbor Day Foundation sampler I bought about 10 years ago.
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Arbor Day Foundation
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