We completed our summer maintenance weekend recently and it was really exciting to see how well the trees, that our wonderful donors and volunteers planted in February, are doing.

From a personal perspective, we may not have been all that happy about the very wet first half to this year, but as you can see from the attached photos, the trees have loved the rain which has helped them get off to a great start.  A relief after the type of severe droughts experienced in recent years where competition for water can mean saplings struggle and tree losses can be high.

We’ve inspected the trees and found around 20 trees that have not survived, which is only about 1% of what we planted.  On average losses are around 10% so we’re doing really well so far, though it’s early days in the life of our trees and there still likely to be more losses.

The weekend involved checking all the trees and guards and resetting any that had fallen over.  The grass has grown long so sometimes these were hard to spot but in nearly all cases the sapling was still there poking up through the grass.

Where we could see that grass was growing inside the tube and smothering the sapling we lifted the tube and weeded around the tree to give it some light. Many of the tubes were clear of grass which could be because of the vigorous screefing many were doing whilst planting in February. A special thanks to the screefers.

It was amazing to see how much the trees had grown, depending on the species some were already half way up the tube and several already surging out of the top. Some of the thorny shrubs even had berries!

Looking ahead we will shortly be reserving the remaining 2850 trees to plant next February and will keep you posted on dates.