Trees need to be planted in the dormant winter season before spring and if you need several thousand ‘whips’, as the bare rooted saplings are called, delivered on a given day in February you ideally need to preorder them by end of September.

But as the summer faded we still had not received any word on our grant application. First the application must be reviewed by the central Forestry Commission and then passed to the local team for assessment. Then, if approved, back it goes to head office for issuing the contract. We learnt that EWCO applications for smaller sites are normally only processed from September onwards.

We couldn’t order the trees before hearing the grant would be awarded which might take another month or two so it looked like we might miss this year’s planting window!