2023 Autumn Tree Planting

 2023 Autumn Tree Planting

Tree Planting Season is here!

This October we are Planing to Plant 255 new trees at our Woodland.

180 Trees to improve our Trackside Hedgerows & to replace the Beech trees that failed to grow along our woodland edge. We will be planting 30 blackthorn, 20 dog rose, 30 crab apple, 30 goat willow, 30 rowan & 40 Hawthorn. This will hopefully help improve the biodiversity of our woodland, creating corridors for wildlife between the farmland and the woodland.

As well as the new Hedgerow planting we have also planed to install new coppice planting within our woodland giving Us a crop of new Hazel coppice & Sweet Chestnut Coppice.

Last year we experimented with the planting of 5 Sweet Chestnut trees and 3 have survived giving Us confidence in expanding our Experimental crop of Sweet Chestnut planting. This year we plan to plant another 15 within our woodland. Sweet Chestnut take a long time before they will produce nuts, around 25 years before they start fruiting. But Sweet Chestnut is a high value coppice crop for wood and worth growing adding more diversity in producing quality wood on our site.

We also tried Planting some Small Leaf lime but they were not as successful as we had hoped as most of the saplings died. We were hoping to have a crop of Small Leaf lime as coppice trees also but it has not turned out as we liked.

We also planted over 65 Beech trees as Hedgerow trees but these also failed to grow in the wood loosing 60 of them.

We are also expanding our Hazel coppice planting 60 more Hazel trees within our wood which should start providing Us a good source of Hazel coppice in 7 years time! Hazel is a much faster growing tree than the Sweet Chestnut. Providing Us with some good quality wood on a shorter rotation.

We are also Starting our Management of our Over stood Hazel , Sycamore & Birch coppice from this year and can hopefully bring some of our overgrown Coppice back in to Rotation! This work needs to be done to rejuvenate the Tree stools or we could end up loosing trees through decay due to old age as they have been out of rotation for at least 30 years!!   

We did coppice a couple of the old trees last year and it seems to have worked so we will start work late Autumn / Winter time.

14/10/23

Cut back the brambles today back to our previous tree planting along our Hedgerow ready to add the new trees to thicken up our hedgerows.    

17/10/23

First stage of Tree planting Commencing Today.

65 trees along the car park & farm boundary. 20 Crab Apple, 20 Goats willow, 10 Blackthorn, 10 Rowan & 5 Dog Rose.

Top Track 25 trees 5 Dog Rose, 10 Blackthorn & 10 Rowan.

Also Installing our Reptile Refugees for our Reptile project.

1 in the car park 2 on the top track area.