Casey Tree Farm Casey Trees announces Design Competition winner By Mark Buscaino, Executive Director, Casey Trees | There is a lot going on at Casey Trees, but when someone asked me recently what the biggest thing was that we tackled of late, the answer was easy — Casey Tree Farm.
tragedy — an electrical fire started by old wiring consumed a portion of the large barn. We restored the barn, replaced the old wiring in it and the other structures as well, and stabilized all of the buildings to eliminate further deterioration.
Five years ago when we were given the farm we knew we had a lot of work ahead. Many of the structures were unoccupied for years and had fallen into disrepair. Paint was peeling, roofs needed replacement, basements were leaking – the list of deferred maintenance was long.
Once the buildings were stabilized, we hired a full time staff to move us to the next phase. Today, because of the hard work of General Manager Brian Mayell and his staff, today we are well on our way toward growing most of the trees we use in our many planting programs. Controlling our tree production to ensure quality and testing new production methods represents fulfillment of an organizational dream. Just two years in and we have already planted more than 1,000 farmgrown trees in D.C. and held more than 20 tours to pass on what we have learned to professionals and laypersons alike to help them re-tree their neighborhoods and communities.
We dedicated our first three years to correcting those problems, and then we were struck by a
But Casey Tree Farm is a big place — more than one square mile of farmland and forest. How else, we asked, could it help us achieve our mission while keeping us connected to the agricultural land ethic embodied in Clarke County, Va., where it is located? We put that question out to 50 colleges and universities across the country and five of them responded to the call.
Casey Tree Farm features a 16-acre tree nursery housing more than 10,000 trees, many of which are native to the Mid-Atlantic or species that are difficult to find commercially.
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The schools and their teams of students and professors provided some great insights; in particular providing detailed soil and related land data identifying what portions of the land would
July 2013 | theleaflet