Thursday 17 September 2015

Guard straightening in the rain

A pensive Ben and John look on as Tania is amused and Hap enjoys his cake. Do the alders heavy with berries suggest a harsh winter ahead?

These trees planted about four years ago are doing well, especially the Italian alder and some of the birch with a few oak also showing good growth. However they have been battered by the wind in places and as the deer are quite a problem here we need to try and keep the trees straight and as protected as possible, so spent a rainy but not unpleasant morning straightening up guards and banging in stakes. Quite few trees were big enough to remove stake and guard completely so we accumulated a store of useful spare materials where they were not too damaged. Quite a few stakes were reused on other trees with broken stakes and the rest were taken back to the nursery. There is more to do here. We were, Hap, Philip, Tania, Ben, John and myself. Cake was a delicious fruit cake. Philip was particularly proud of a new tool belt and I was excited about using my new camera only to find after taking one group photo it had run out of memory so had to resort back to my phone for 'the belt'.
Geoff
'The belt'