Back in the park
As I said in my last post I haven’t spent much time in the park recently, but at the end of June I spent a sunny Saturday, the first for about 4 weeks, in the park. It was a “Conservation Volunteer” weekend, and with 7 volunteers (an excellent number, the highest I can remember for some time) we got on with killing plants.
Doesn’t sound like a ‘conservation’ job does it! Well what we were doing was weeding the Community Tree Nursery; this is an area of the park specifically given over to the raising of trees. We try to make sure we collect enough seeds in Seed Gathering week (September) to grow lots of trees both for planting out in the park during tree planting (October/November) and for donating to local good causes. You can also buy trees from us as well for a small donation (sorry had to get the plug in).
Just to explain the need for a nursery; a tree seed isn’t ready for planting out in the woodland 2 months after it was planted – that would be too easy! the reason for a tree nursery is that some trees take a very long time to germinate and get to a height at which they can “look after themselves”, the tree nursery attempts to protect them when they are at their most vulnerable.
Not all tree seeds survive, fairly obvious if you think about it, an oak might have a 100,000 acorns but it doesn’t spawn a 100,000 trees every year, and a tree has lots of predators in the park, from tiny bugs who might infect the tree and reduce the number of seeds it produces, to birds who eat the seeds (there are some trees that take advantage of that and use the birds to spread their seeds), to squirrels rabbits, and munt jac; of all of these Squirrels are probably the most prolific, the cute little grey bundles of fluff that all many of us try to feed peanuts to in the park are, as far as the tree is concerned, the equivalent of a hurricane mixed with a tsunami and a touch of firestorm! Squirrels eat the seeds, (although they will also bury some and forget where to put them) fairly indiscriminately, and as they are a relatively new species to the UK nothing has really evolved a defence to them. so again if we take our example of the oak with a 100,000 acorns, a couple of squirrels could pretty much eat through those in a season.
Rabbits are also tree killers, they’ll eat saplings as they grow – this is useful in the sense that the park would be full of sycamore if it wasn’t for voracious little bunnies, but they aren’t selective, and pretty much from the moment a tree first sticks it’s head above ground it’s rabbit fodder! and once a tree has survived the first onslaught of the bunny menace and it’s got a nice covering of bark it’s not safe because in the winter when the abundance of sweet soft grass and other materials has dwindled the rabbits will eat tree bark! it must be their equivalent of jerky! the problem with this is rabbits can’t climb, if they could they might only strip the bark from one part of the tree, but as they can’t climb they eat around the bottom of the tree in a circle, “ring barking” it. They don’t just it the bark of course, they also eat the cambium layer, which is the trees blood supply, it’s the layer just under the bark that the tree uses to transport nutrients from the roots up into the crown. it’s quite a thin layer and very near the surface so it makes a tasty treat for the bunny monster, and once they have eaten their way round the bottom of the tree through the bark and the cambium layer you have without doubt a dead tree, a tree that is no more, no longer living, shuffled orf this mortal coil…. sorry very bad python moment then.
Munt Jac are also effective tree killers, and whilst no where near as prolific, they can be just as devastating, basically they browse the tops of young saplings, not too much of a problem you may think – you’ll just end up with lots of tree shrubs as they bush out, which is true to a point, but when food is a little scarce (this winter for example) they’ll just eat and eat and eat, and remember at this point most of our 100,000 acorns haven’t survived so in terms of percentage population they’ve probably done as much damage as any other wildlife.
Anyway enough about why we have a tree nursery and more about what we did in it. A weed is a plant in the wrong place, no other definition required I think, in fact it’s fair to say that it is a totally man made idea, in nature plants grow where they grow, the strong ones survive the weaker ones die off. But in the tree nursery we are trying to grow specific types of tree, generally the rule is it must be native to the UK and preferably native to the local region. The definition of native is set by the park management and currently means “Any tree that was in existence in the UK at the end of the Ice Age” (there are certain political parties that would just love that, but I won’t start that rant here). This covers all of the usual subjects, Oak, Lime, Beech, Birch, Hazel, Willow etc but doesn’t include some surprising ones Sycamore (which isn’t a bad thing – see the definition of weed above), Sweet Chestnut and Walnut to name but a few.
The Nursery isn’t huge, but does have about 12 beds of various sizes, including 8 raised beds, where the saplings are raised and four very long thin beds where the trees are planted out until they are ready to go to their final spot.
And this particular weekend it hadn’t been weeded since the start of the spring – it was a mess, the weather, which had that point has been a combination of rain and sun, had, after the late start encouraged everything to just charge out of the ground, including about a million (and I’m not exaggerating that much) sycamore saplings.
Now the problem with tree saplings, at least very small ones, is that they tend to all look exactly the same at least to the untrained eye, which I of course have in abundance, and the weed we had most of was sycamore. The policy is simple, if it’s not on the list of trees we keep it goes; if it is on the list but is quite prolific anyway, it goes (to make room for the harder species), otherwise it stays. simply said of course does not mean simply done. A Field Maple, for example, is of the same family as Sycamore, but is on the list of things to keep, even if it’s self set, and it’s almost impossible to tell the two apart until quite late on, which means that every so often Helen would ask us to “leave that one to grow a bit more” which roughly translates to “blimey I haven’t got a clue what that is and i need it to get older before I tell them to rip a perfectly good tree out of the ground”.
There were all the usual type of weeds – generally with shallow roots and relatively easy to remove, but the Sycamore seedlings are more problematic. They seem to be able to grip the soil like nothing else, not so bad when they are really tiny, but once they are about 3 inches high the hang on like limpets so the only way to safely remove them is to get a hold of them as close to the ground as possible and pull slowly but firmly, even then you’ll probably only be successful about 75% of the time, not a problem when your pulling up just a few, but remember we had thousands to get rid of. The raised beds were a little easier because the soil isn’t so compacted, so after much thought and deliberation I thought my expertise and knowledge was best served by concentrating on the raised bed (come you knew I wouldn’t go for the hard bit"!)
It was a very easy job, not least of which because apart from some oak and some willow there wasn’t anything else growing in the beds. This made weeding easy but it did bring home the serious point that this year we won’t have many trees to bring on into the Park (or anywhere else for that matter). The reason for this is that the last two years seed gathering events have been sorely under subscribed, and to be honest it’s a worry. So – and here’s the crux of the matter, this whole text has been not just another chance for me to talk about my self but the first part of a marketing campaign for 2010 Seed gathering week! it’ll take place in the autumn and we need everyone’s support. It’s easy to do – you just go for a walk round the park with a crib sheet showing you what trees we are looking for, and what the seeds look like and at the end of your walk you bring them back and they get planted, or prepared for germination. You don’t even have to do the walk in the park, we will be interested in seeds from where ever you can find them, just as long as they are on the list.
And in case you’re interested the weeding went really well, by the end of the day we had cleared the majority of the beds and the stack of weeds was starting to be turned into compost.
