There are 15 steps to planting a tree and one of them can kill you.

After measuring the tree’s root systems, you must dig at a specific location.

White flags are tree-planting locations. Yellow flags are gas lines. Blue spray-painted lines are houses’ water lines. Green lines are sewage pipes. Red lines are electricity lines.

“(Electricity lines) are very shallow. Digging into it could kill you,” said Steve, a volunteer who showed participants of a tree-planting event how to plant them.

About 120 volunteers planted trees around the university neighborhood Saturday morning beginning in Thornden Park. Onondaga Save the Rain, Onondaga Earth Corps and Cornell Cooperative Extension hosted the event.

Trees were planted in locations on popular streets like Euclid Avenue, Clarendon Street, Ostrom Avenue and Ackerman Avenue.

About 50 of the volunteers were from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Other volunteers were environmentally friendly families of Syracuse. Every volunteer wore a reflective green vest and working gloves.

At the start of the event, Katherine Korba, the natural resources community educator for the Cornell University Cooperative Extension, said to simply “be cautious of traffic and look out for pickaxes.” She added that they try to plant 1,000 trees per year.

The event began with three demos of tree plantings led by experienced volunteers.

“We all just thought it was a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning — stand in the cold and plant trees. As ESF students, we have to put our money where our mouth is,” said Lelle Donnelly, a junior biotechnology major at SUNY-ESF.

Adrienne Canino, a member of Onondaga Earth Corps, said the majority of the trees planted were in front of people’s houses.

“We knock door-to-door and give the spiel on how trees save Onondaga Lake. You get a real feel of the parts that want trees and don’t,” Canino added.

Onondaga Lake now consists of rainwater from drainage pipes and raw sewage. The three organizations seek to make better use of rainwater with trees. Trees keep rainwater in their canopies and root zones and release it into the atmosphere later on, according to Save the Rain’s organization’s website.

One group planted 11 total trees. Five were planted in front of Erwin First United Methodist Church at the corner of Euclid and Roosevelt avenues. Six more were planted at houses along Westcott Street off Euclid Avenue.

In total, the volunteers at the event planted 83 trees around the university neighborhood.

Published on November 8, 2015 at 9:48 pm

Contact Anjani: asiman@syr.edu