Several years ago, I made it a habit each spring to purchase young sapling trees from the Clearwater Soil and Conservation office. These trees are economical and you can purchase large quantities for good prices. The difference in buying these trees and the trees you buy at a local nursery is that you have to wait longer for maturity. They range in sizes from 15 inches – 3 feet in height depending on the variety you are buying. Each year I made it a pact to buy at least 200 trees and each year the survival rate was quite low. My soil on my property is poor consisting of gravel, sand and clay.
My kids were small at this time and I always felt it was a waste to use disposable diapers as I knew they would just end up in the landfills.
One day I had an idea! I took one of my son’s wet diaper and threw it in a bucket of water. It swelled up about the size of a basketball. I was amazed at the amount of water it could retain. Lifting it out of the bucket it was heavy, but no water dripped from it.
I laid the diaper on the picnic table and opened it up, then took it apart. The plastic peeled off the cotton liner easily. I threw the plastic away and took the inside liner and noticed that the water was absorbed by small gel particles.
I then dug a hole about 15 inches deep in the driest part of my land. I dropped the cotton liner in the hole and added 4 inches of dirt. I placed a deciduous sapling tree on the 4 inches of dirt and filled the hole to the top. I watered it a bit but did not water it the rest of the summer. That summer it was dry and we received very little rain. The tree did not appear ever to show signs of wilt. The vegetation around it looked stressed. The tree grew almost 2 feet that year. In the fall, I dug a hole next to the tree and noticed that the tree roots had established themselves around the the diaper cotton liner and branched out from there. My conclusion was that the diaper liner attracted moisture and that the tree was satisfactorily supplied moisture when it was needed.
The following spring, the tree was one of the first trees to leaf out and seemed very healthy. I purchased 4 plastic garbage cans. Two for holding used wet diapers (not the poopy ones). One for holding water of which I would later throw the used wet ones in this to absorb as much water as they could and 1 for holding the liner after I pulled off the plastic liners. I then took a big stick and stirred the liners until they broke up like mashed potaotes. That spring I purchased more saplings and planted each tree in like manner with digging the hole, putting in a few shovel scoops of diaper mash, four inches of dirt on top of the mash and finally the tree. At the end of the summer I counted the trees that survived. I planted 200. 197 trees survived the hot summer. I did not water any of them. My success rate went up to almost 97% from 25-30% without the mash.
The following spring I contacted day care centers and close friends to save their used wet diapers of which they did. At one point, I believe I had over 1,000 diapers waiting to be harvested and recycled. By this time, my kids were assisting. I know my son for one thought his father had lost his marbles. That spring I planted over 1,000 trees in and around the property with the same success with the 197 trees. If you were to come out to the garden center I could point out to you which trees were planted in diaper mash. Since that time, I have seen in garden centers an absorbing granual that you can dip your trees in that probably has the same effect as the diaper mash.
I wish now that I would have taken pictures of my diaper mash assembly with my kids helping. I got quite a reputation in town and was often called the “diaper man”. People laughed at me all the time, but my experiment worked. Sometimes when ideas pop in your head, dare to be different and try them out, you might just surprize yourself and others with a new discovery.
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