The right kind of tree

By the Session Leader:

Trees were our business today, but not all of them seasonal.

In the morning, Earth Trust needed us at their arboretum to do some “weeding”.

Weeding?  They meant: taking out ash saplings – a whole forest of them.

Those saplings had to be harvested, in order to give space for the cricket-bat willows (salix alba), which grow twice as fast as their neighbouring bay willows (salix pentandra).  With loppers and saws, we made short work of that:

Here is some ash suffering from ash dieback – a fungal disease, which makes diamond-shaped lesions in the bark before starving the leaves:  

Most of the ash at this location is healthy.

Conversation, much of it looking back to the start of Christmas and New Year, drifted into glass-half-empty-or-half-full mode.  We decided every team needs its “snagger and rubbisher”, but not all the time please.  Let’s have some bright sparks too!

The catkins were just coming into fruit in the sun.  [Has anyone told them snow is on the way, if the wind veers to the north as forecast? – Ed.]  Catkin-bearing plants are varied, including birch, willow, hickory, sweet chestnut and sweetfern (Comptonia).

Before long, we had cut down great swathes of ash, leaving the stumps to be ‘glyphosated’ later.  [Not by Green-Gymmers, of course, but by Earth-Trust staff licensed to ‘paint’ stumps. – Ed.]

We had also broken a pathway through the copse to the reveal the landrover and the tea crate.  Wonderful “PanaTony” and chocolate cake today.

Here is how not to store the tools, with saw-blade and billhook nicely positioned to take out carefree passers-by:

After tea, we all turned to producing binders.  To qualify for this use, rods had be minimum 2 metres long, and whippy-thin for weaving in and out of laid hedges:

The binders were bundled into batches of 20:

We also made stakes out of the thicker trunks, precisely 5’8” long and bundled into 10s:

And after all that: time for the Green-Gym seasonal celebrations.  Staff at the pub, who put on a splendid spread, had also very sweetly left up the Christmas tree, just for us: