That seemed like a long but busy winter...

 So , the blog has been quiet but the field hasn’t. 

It has been a tough winter both from a personal point of view and a weather one. The cold hung around for a long time. The low temperatures and low mood were lifted by a lot of progress with tree planting though. 


For all 25 trees being planted in a day doesn’t seem a lot , when you do this once or twice every weekend , suddenly the field starts to fill up and the whole feel of the place changes. Every now and again , you look up from your digging and realise just how much work had been done. So many people answered the calls for help and turned up in shockingly bad weather to push the plan forward. Working in icey winds, hail, snow and frozen ground, progress continued due to the kindness of volunteers. 


The Woodland Trusts’ delivery of bundles of 25 trees turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Though the overall quantity was intimidating sometimes (having several hundred trees that need planting before spring was on my mind an awful lot), having parcels of 25 at a time meant that you could work for two hours with two or three people and achieve something meaningful before going home to warm up. It also meant we didn’t have to disturb too many trees in the tree nursery each planting session or commit to planting too many each day when the weather was bad. 




All told , with some containerised trees added into the mix , I think we planted 450 trees in the planting season. That’s pretty good going when we were tagging every one of them as we went. The tree database still needs some editing and to be visible “online” (that job never seems to be top of the list) but the raw data is there safe for the future. 


It is hard to express how happy it made me that people continued to turn up and share the workload and hopefully the joy of watching things grow in the future. 

I am behind on some of the blogs I had hoped to write. We have bees in the field , picnic benches, a fancy mower and much more. I would like to keep a record of all of these stories, so more to come soon. 

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