Today’s Advent Calendar window opens to ask you to plant a tree. As Green Tips go, this seams an obvious one, but as someone somewhere once said, the best time to plant a tree was years ago, the second best time is now! You can join us to plant trees, save saplings or take some for your group from our Community Allotment Tree Nursery.
Did you know that Wellingborough Eco Group with our volunteer Nature Rangers and North Northamptonshire Council, planted over a thousand trees in Wellingborough last year? Well, we are going to be planting another thousand trees next year too, do join us!
After successful planting sessions last December (as featured on last year’s Advent Calendar, see video below and header image) and again in March, we are returning to Kilborn park and two other locations to plant lots more trees! We will have tea and coffee available, plus hand washing facilities. Meet at our Tree Planting Stations from 10am.
We will be planting whips again with North Northamptonshire Council and everything will be fully funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. We plan to plant a mixture of native woodland species. We have selected the following three sites for possible planting: (Please also see maps below with planting areas highlighted in red):
- Kilborn Park : It would be great to continue with the planting we did last year in this park. There’s still plenty of space and we plan to plant another 500 whips here.
- Gainsborough Drive: Planting along the right-side edge of the greenspace alongside the existing trees. This would include around 300 trees.
- Brickhill Road: Planting along the line of existing trees to create a graded woodland edge habitat. This would include approximately 200 trees.
We are looking to plant the trees in the New Year on the third Saturday of each month, please join us at our planting trees events on the following dates:
- Kilborn Park (500 trees) – Saturday 18th January
- Gainsborough Drive (300 trees) – Saturday 15th February
- Brickhill Road (200 trees) – Saturday 15th March
Come and plant a tree – The trees will be a mixture of hawthorn, dogwood, wild cherry, silver birch, rowan and hazel, bring your spades and join in from 10am! All welcome, we would like everyone like to come and plant trees!
Sapling Savers
We also want your saplings, the trees that have self set in random places where they either aren’t wanted or stand no chance of growing. Could you be a Nature Ranger Sapling Saver?
The plan is to save redundant or unwanted saplings to transplant them to places where they are wanted and can become mature trees. This is part of the More Trees Now campaign, which started in the Netherlands and has now come to the UK and Ireland. The aim is to accelerate tree planting initiatives throughout the UK to stop climate change and support biodiversity restoration.
Simply dig up saplings that are in the wrong place and drop them off to us at ECO HUB or to our Community Allotment. These will be plunged in at our Community Allotment Tree Nursery and redistributed from there.
Community Allotment Tree Nursery
We set up our Tree Nursery at Ladywell Allotments in March 2018, when we were given 28 whips to look after by Welly Trees. Since then we have added hundreds of whips and saplings to the nursery, and so far we have freely redistributed over 150 trees to groups and local councils.
The plan is to grow them for a couple of years and then to plant them (with permission) around the town and to share them with other community groups. If your group would like some trees for free, please do get in touch to find out what is available via email, social media or call/text/WhatsApp 07311 705705.