Incredibly good news: Zach’s redwood forest lives! I had dreaded coming out to see the nearly 900 sequoias we planted late last Spring, many as late as May 2012. Today I am astonished to find nearly all survived the three month summer drought, and some have grown nearly waist high! This juvenile forest will live for thousands of years, outliving the surrounding Doug fir plantations, reseed the entire mountain with the original tree, Sequoia Sempervirens. Coast Redwood.

These tiny trees have a vitality beyond imagination. Anyone who’s walked through the millennium groves in Northern California knows of the awe and reverence felt amongst the giants.  My choice of Sequoia is both out of a commitment to permaculture and an expression of renegade forest management, since these trees will have little “commercial value” to the lumber industry, until all the mono-cropped firs have died off due to blight or wildfire or just too much water, heart-rot. Sequoia resistance to all these is superior. And as greenhouse CO2 goes up, they will grow faster and faster. The waist high tree in the picture grew 18 inches in 9 months!!