After enjoying Heslington park run in the rain, 4 GoodGymers helped Treemendous York Partnership to plant 500 saplings beside the new Nursery. The sun came out and Nestlé provided a delicious background chocolate scent as convivial folk happily dug holes, chatted, planted & hammered.

Next 500 sapling session 7th December.

After an unexpectedly soggy and cold parkrun, Lucy, Jason (visiting from Leeds, welcome!) and I headed up the hill in search of the team. This proved to be rather more difficult than anticipated as the work location was out of date! After collecting some also lost student volunteers we were eventually found by volunteer Barry, who guided us back to the group. There we met Cara (who'd very wisely gone for a coffee on the way) and got started.

Our "unglamorous" task was to clear around the base of all the trees to allow them to grow better and not get swamped by grass, and to replace any broken tree guards.

After an hour of work, we all called it a day, plenty enough for a damp, cold morning, and headed home to warm up.

The next 2 sessions will involve tree planting at a new, well-rotivated site which should be very satisfying, so do come along if you can!

Four of us went along on a sunny Saturday to help Treemendous check on the saplings up at Kimberlow Hill.

This involved taking a peek inside each tree guard to see whether its occupant was still alive, then pulling out any weeds, replacing the guard and straightening the stake if necessary. It turns out that tree guards make ideal vertical ant nests - so quite a few of our trees were sharing their living quarters with these high-rise apartm-ants! However, the trees took priority, meaning we had to knock down the nests to make sure the growing tree trunks weren't smothered.

Some essential woodland maintenance was carried out on previously planted trees at Kimberlow Hill. Helping the trees and biodiversity.

Six superb Good Gymers supported Treemendous volunteers to plant 600 tiny trees of 8 native species. The sun shone but the wind was cold (as it tends to be up on Kimberlow Hill). In the final planting session of the season, holes were dug, roots were tucked in, the earth trodden down, cane supports were hammered into place and snug tree guards fitted to protect against those pesky rabbits. I'm sure we'll be back planting again in the autumn but over the summer there will be plenty of opportunities to go back to nurture and protect those small saplings. Sorry about the lack of photos, I was enjoying planting too much 🤭

Sadly I couldn't make it to todays task, but 3 marvellous hardy GoodGymers turned up to help the Treemendous folk plant 550 new trees. Fantastic effort. Thank you.