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Update- June 2008
Plans are underway in my head to organise a planting this year to add grasses and ground covers to the site. The trees that were planted are looking really great and I’ll add a photograph here very soon to show their growth in the last two years.
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Update- April 2007
Even with the harsh meanness of this past summer, we have estimated roughly a 50% survival rate of the tree plantings without any supplemental watering. This is really very very good and shows how well all our helpers planted them.
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Richard and Angela’s tree planting day
Saturday 12th August 2006
Saturday 12th August turned out be a beautiful sunny spring day, perfect for releasing some trees into the wild.
Our faithful volunteers arrived, shovels in hands probably wondering why we had chosen not to mention that the planting site was just short of Himalayan altitudes, as hinted at below.
Ok, so it’s wasn’t that bad, but after 3.5 hours I was glad the sun was setting and we could get onto flat ground. It looks like we planted about 120 trees which is brilliant.
It was really cool to see something happen so quickly on the farm. Usually, Richard and I work for hours and see nothing. Having some friends mad enough to give up their Saturday for an afternoon on the slopes with shovel in hand and a fair bit of crawling around was fantastic. It is truly humbling.
Surely Richard and I owe them all a day of hard gardening at their places in return, so thanks go out to: Roxanne, Sarah, Zoe, Craig and Graham for all their hard work and for giving up their Saturday.
Molly and Elf also flap and ear and wave a paw in friendly greetings to Molly & Stanley, their new dog friends.
We finished off the evening with a campfire at which a few family and friends with handy excuses to pop in after the planting arrived, but that was nice. We know Saturdays are really precious so we are even more humbled that people sacrificed theirs for the sake of planting some trees or coming up for the campfire. As I’m writing, there is a good downpour of rain outside so I think all will be well in the new forest.
The only energetic task of the night was leaving the fire to rummage around in the dark for adequate toasting sticks. My favourite quote overhead on the night was “Marshmallows are a food group”. See, it’s true, campfires always bring out the inner philospher in people. Rumour was that a certain folk band might turn up to play a tune or two, but this was not to be, so since everyone was too weary to object, it seemed only right to subject everyone to my crappy compilation cd’s, who needs a subwoofer when you have a steel barn to amplify your tunes!
Reports from my sources suggest that the campfire was a particularly well stoked one, its smokey molecules lingering on fibre and hair for days. Hmmm….
But … surely that’s what farm life is all about, getting dirty and smelly and eating charcoal for dinner.