Village Woodland Project - part 1

First some background. Our village has an environmental group and we've already held an eco day , shown the film An Inconvenient Truth and organised litter picks ( we've another one tomorrow) but this is our most ambitious project to date.

With kind permission of a village land owner we plan to plant up to 800 native English trees at a site on the edge of the village. This will offset our carbon, promote biodiversity and be creating a new page of village history.

The site is very pretty on the edge of a field with a pond at its back and sweeping fields to the front. We'd collected sponsorship and applied for grants over the summer in order to purchase the trees, stakes and rabbit guards needed. The trees are locally grown and are a mix of species like oaks, ash, crab apples, field maples, hazels and other native woodland trees. It will look lovely when it grows up!

Today was the first public part of the planting plans. The area had already been cleaned of weeds and brambles and mowed flat. Volunteers braved the cold wet November afternoon to mark out where the trees were to go using coloured stakes to denote tree types. We also started digging holes at each planting spot so that when we come to actually plant, the soil will already have been loosened so speeding up the job somewhat - there are 800 trees you remember.

It was cold and increasingly wet as the afternoon progressed but its amazing what a lovely group of villagers can do working together ( which for me is one of the most important bits ;-) )

The photos I hope do it justice. It is a lovely place and its quite special to be at the beginning of the cycle of life that planting it will start.


We will of course add more photos and updates as this project progresses. We're also both on www.twitter.com so are doing updates in real time. And if you click here which takes you to fiddlesticks.tv you can see a small video that was shot this afternoon as we worked!