What Four Years of Planting Days Have Taught Us About Timing

When we started, we scheduled planting days around volunteer availability and whatever weekend suited our own calendar. Four years and several hundred trees later, our own records tell a clearer story: timing relative to the rains matters more than almost any other single factor we can control.

Seedlings planted in the two to three weeks after the long rains begin consistently show stronger first-year survival than those planted during a dry spell and watered by hand afterward. Establishing roots while rainfall is doing most of the watering work simply gives a young tree a better start than we can replicate with jerricans and good intentions.

This does not mean planting outside the rains is pointless, particularly for species with deeper or more drought-tolerant root systems, but it does mean we now schedule the bulk of our street plantings deliberately around the rainy season calendar rather than around convenience.

It also changed how we brief households planting their own trees. A seedling collected from our nursery in the middle of a dry spell is far better off waiting a few weeks for the rains than being planted immediately and hoping for the best.

We have built this lesson into a simple planting calendar that we now share at every nursery handover, matching species and planting windows to Nairobi's typical rainfall pattern rather than leaving it to guesswork.