Tree Nursery

A busy half term, opening up an access into the Green Lane and 2nd Orchard to establish a tree nursery.

View through foot opening to Green Lane and 1st Orchard beyond.

A couple of days of Blackthorn clearance and a couple of boulders later. Big thanks to Darren and Alex.











In amongst that time to walk in 300 young trees lay out a mulch/self watering system. Thanks Sian.

Nursery started off with various woodland collected seedlings and year old chestnuts grown from last years Greenwich Park harvest and this years for germination.

Apple blossom in the 1st Meadow where the trees in the shelter belt had been badly hit by frost the previous week.

In the Car Park fascinated by a particular flying insect that appeared dropping eggs from the air onto the car roof!

3rd Oct
The sky was clear this morning, so drove to Greenwich Park to see how the chestnuts were doing. Quite a lot of nuts on the ground were not fully grown, but found a few trees that they had matured and some where they were a reasonable size. As it was a windy day the technique of finding a good, unpopular tree and waiting for them to drop proved fairly successful. Recommended to me by an unusually chatty chinese guy of few english words and a jade buddha on a chain round his neck. He actually stayed in one spot, but I collected twice as much by checking out lots of the good trees from last year. Was also able to pick off a few trees. Looks like there will still be plenty for next w/e and an earlier start will help. Rough count for today 700.
PaulA

Whit Ramble Round

In the Gateway of Top Hay field

Two years since planting the Sibley apple tree now standing 8ft. high in First Meadow.

Crow Meadow ferns amidst thick bluebells with possibly the site’s oldest oak just beyond the in-bloom hawthorn.

Beech tree planted from a pot kept in a Penzance yard until 2003 when Liz thought it a good spot in the shelter of the adjacent gorse. Originally collected as sprouted coteledons from Trevaylor woods by Paul on a walk with Sarah in 1995. Grown on in fish crates with some 80 others for a couple of years at Helnoweth, most planted out into hedgerows there.

Some hand weeding of seed trenches reveal

Seeds into trenches were Ash last Easter, Chestnuts and Birch in the early Autumn. Birch seeds were from the upper branches of a 30 ft. tree taken down in a Surrey garden. Thanks Sue. As well as planting it’s seeds we also made the most of the wood some being made into Besoms for the family including a small one for our new niece Daisy born on the day we felled the tree.

Having taken down two sections of 10 ft we were unable to get a saw behind the remaining pollard. This Spring it unexpectedly began to regrow.

April 2010

With some help from a friend we put in most of the the 1300 trees we purchased this year. Mostly planted on the Croft which is visible from the road and raised a few comments from neighbours - all positive. Some infilling and extension of the shelter belt started in 2008. Both areas partly visible in the picture below taken from near the car park.

We found also found that Google had updated their sateillite imagery to show the extent of the bracken management mowing last year. Will be able to use this to check the success of trees in shading out bracken in the future.

August 2009

Bit late going up with these from August 2009. A walk around fields with camera caught the following three creatures amongst more common varieities.