How to Plant Trees with Limited Water

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By Gail Martin
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Trees on the prairie

Shade trees are few on the prairies in states like Kansas. There just isn't enough rain. Here's how to grow your own despite water limitations. It's a technique my family used in the 1930s.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Step 1

I would like to take you back to the Flint Hills, there I could show you every place we lived during those early oil boom days. The company moved us several times through my early years. Always in the same area of the Flint Hills, just on different oil leases as the oil drilling and production expanded. Mostly nothing is left but prairie to show where the many houses had been.
Step 2

But my daddy left his mark! On those lonely grasslands the only trees were cottonwoods and willows down in the damp creek bottoms. Daddy would dig up cottonwood seedlings and replant them around our home for much needed shade. They grew fast if they had plenty of water. He explained that the trees would die away from the moisture in the creek if we didn’t water them.
Step 3

Now you could use plastic pipe

When he planted each tree, he buried a two-foot length of iron pipe beside it. One end down by the roots and the other barely sticking up out of the ground. This way we could water the tree where it was needed and not the surrounding ground that dried out almost instantly in the hot summer winds.
Step 4

I was so proud to be able to help Mother carry her wash water down to the pipes for the trees weekly watering. Even if those trees are gone now that it is fifty and sixty years later, I can still find the pipes.