282 FOREST OUTINGS 



apart break up the wide reaches and temper the winds. Many of the trees, 

 after 3 years of growth, are over 20 feet tall. Many of them are more than 

 30 feet tall. 



Children from the schools come to the newly planted strips for their 

 picnics. Farm families are tempted into the open for a watermelon "bust" 

 in the shade of the trees. Where the strips are close to the farmstead, the 

 family may take a noontime siesta there. For the first time in their lives 

 many prairie farm boys are learning what trees were meant for — sheltering 

 places to sprawl, rest, or play. Already there are swings for the young on the 

 limbs of many of these new plantations. These trees are really growing. 



When the Prairie States Forestry Project started many Plains residents 

 said it was foolish, that trees would not grow in those parts. And it remains, 

 as David Cushman Coyle remarks in his book Roads to a New America, 

 "a curious fact" that most people who do not live in that part of the country 

 and see those new trees growing "believe that the shelterbelt was just another 

 failure." 



"If God didn't make any trees in the Plains, how can man put them 

 there?" they ask. The answer, Coyle continues, "is that a seed cannot grow 

 in that country because the ground dries farther down than its first-year root 

 can reach. But if it is started in a nursery and transplanted after its roots are 

 long enough to reach below the bone-dry surface layer, it will grow. In the 

 first 3 years, 6,500 miles of shelterbelt were successfully established, but the 

 Plains need 220,000 miles of it." 



To people accustomed to live with trees, the idea may seem ridiculous, 

 but even at the end of the first 2 years, when most of the plantings did not 

 stand more than 1 5 feet high, on the average, the Plains people already were 

 starting to have picnics in that new-made shade. Now with a canopy 30 

 feet high, and — in many places — higher, recreational use of plantings has 

 increased; and birds return to add charm and variety to the scene. 



On the strips planted under the Prairie States Forestry Project, doves 

 have been known to nest in trees the year they were set out. Scissor-tailed 

 fly catchers, quail, prairie chickens, and other indigenous species are now 

 commonly seen in plantings only 3 years old. This increase in birds has 

 economic value in insect and weed control. But possibly the value that bird 



