Over the last few months we have been out in all weathers planting young trees in moorland gullies at Gilsland, near Brampton. It’s a village about 20 miles west of Hexham, and straddles the border between Northumberland and Cumbria.
This was the last of our planned weekends in a significant Nature Recovery project, and this time we were blessed with a beautiful bright sunny day. We were planting willow, alder and hawthorn with a few rowan, birch and aspen in the overall mix, to improve habitat space for moorland birds such as black grouse.
The trees were planted by lightly screefing (removing the surface vegetation to create a planting space) the surface. They were then planted with as little disturbance to the soil as possible with a small slit cut or T-cut into the soil for the roots to go in. We then used wool mulch mats to bed the trees in, helping to suppress weeds and reduce the risk of voles chomping the trees.
There’s always extra benefits being out in nature. Our tree planting facilitator Lorna Jane spotted some cute pixie lichen cups and she reports: “Zooming in on my photos they have red dots on them which potentially makes them Cladonia pleurota, which seems to be very rare on the distribution map.
“I was lucky to be working with a group who got the afternoon sun on our side of gully. We basked in the low winter sun casting long shadows over the ground and then walked back past the lovely highland cows, before having well deserved tea and cake by the fire. ”
Thank you to everyone for their help today and in recent planting days; you’ve been amazing! Around 4500 trees have been planted along the gullies by volunteers in the last couple of months. And we get skies like this…..
