It is funny when you day dream about something , and then you worry (or I do) whether it will live up to expectations. I dreamed about our first "real planting day" - planting days like the ones I have done years ago, with the Woodland Trust and the Heart of England Forest, where dozens of trees are planted and a woodland actual starts. This dream has gone on for years, but it has been much more in my thoughts this year for obvious reasons.
That dream planting day came all of a sudden, and to a certain extent took me by surprise. I got an email from a tree supplier to say "your order has been despatched". It didn't say which order (25 trees or 45 trees - or both).
In my head, trees wouldn't start to arrive until the really cold weather in the New Year. It still feels (and is) absurdly warm - which is a worry for climate change reasons. I had imagined that I would have all the paths marked out before tree arrived - but no, trees were arriving very soon. This week in fact. And they would need planting sharpish (the instructions for bare root stock is to get them in the ground within a fortnight, ideally much more quickly). And all of them were coming in one consignment.
So a plan had to be made. Work comitments meant that it would have to be at the weekend and the Sunday had the best forecast. Would we get 70 trees planted in a day though? How many people to invite to help plant (considering COVID rules)? Could I manage all the people? How to organise everyone? How to guide people where to plant and what to plant? Could we tag each tree as intended? There was quite a bit to think about and not a lot of time.
I decided to keep the number of helpers small, I was lucky in that I had more offers of help than I needed - a lovely situation to be in and a reflection of how lucky I am to have such good friends (or that people love the idea of planting trees). I planned 2x shifts of 2x hours, hoping we could plant quickly enough to get everything in.
I arrived early (before the first shift of helpers) and had a practice run, tree number 69 went in the ground at the end of the woodland design - a copper beach tree. I put it in a tube (we are mixing tubes and spirals this year to see which works best and whether deer or rabbits do really present a problem). Once I had everything in the right place in the field, it didn't take too long to do the one tree. There was hope that we might manage all the planting in a single day.
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Tree Number Sixty-Nine
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| A happy planter |
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| We had sunshine in the morning and long shadows. |
The rest of the trees I had intended to place in large water buckets to soak the roots, but 70 trees (particularly the Yew trees) took up a lot of space and this proved tricky. They had to be soaked in shifts and the non soaking trees stored with their roots well wrapped.
Once tree 69 was in, I started to place canes around the field where I thought we should plant. As planters arrived, I brief them on how deep to plant, how best to firm them in and how we would be adding the spirals / guards. Easy so far. Off they went to work.
But blimey they worked quickly.
I had intended to tag each tree (see future blog about tagging) as we planted. I had pre-printed 85+ metal tags to use on the day. Being a data geek, I also wanted to capture the lat/long of each tree in combination with its tag number so that it could be displayed on Google Maps at some point in the future (likely it will be on this blog). While I was at it, I wanted to capture who planted each tree - particularly as some youngsters had joined us to do some planting. I always think it is a brilliant thing to give kids the opportunity to plant trees and watch them grow up as they themselves grow up. I want any kids who plant a tree to be able to say precisely which trees they planted and to be able to find their trees when they return in the future. However long into the future that might be.
My tagging idea was my undoing on the day. It slowed everything down. For future planting days, I need to work out a better way. I ended up running around providing tags to people and recording the tree in my database (accessed via my phone) before they could put their tree guards on. I couldn't keep up with the planting - and as a result I only planted 3 trees myself during the whole day. Even a tiny planting team could plant much more quickly than I could tag them. Plus I was having to keep running around with canes to indicate where the next set of trees would be going - and then fishing trees out of the water tubs so the planters knew what tree to put at which cane (being a control freak - the tree locations and species was entirely my decision - and I wasn't sharing that job with anyone).
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A young guest working hard
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For future days, I may give people a bundle of tags to use and ask them to leave a note on the tree guard saying who planted it and what tag number it was - and I can then mop up the tagging afterwards and hopefully do more planting myself. I could also possibly train somebody to do the tagging and enter all the details into the database to share some of that workload. One way or another, I need to speed things up if the Woodlands Trusts threat to send 300 trees in one go is to be managed sensibly. I also want to plant more trees myself.
We did get there by the end of Sunday though. We planted 70 trees, a mix of poplar, copper beach and yew (species the Woodland Trust won't be sending).
It was a busy day (we only just managed to get the last trees in and tagged before we ran out of daylight and mobile phone charge), it was so busy that I didn't manage to stop and appreciate the moment so much and I felt that I was making very rapid decisions on what should go where - not exactly how I imagined it would be. Again, two things I need to change next time.
The treat at the end of the day though, was realising , that we had all made a change to this landscape. It suddenly looked subtly different. And it would never ever look the same again. What ever happens, there should be trees in that field from now on. If nobody does anything else, even now, with only 70 tress planted, it will be a very modest little woodland one day. And we did that together. The dream wasn't a dream anymore, it was very real. And it felt very good indeed.
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Planters safely spaced for Covid reasons - with visible tree guards. We are on our way.
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