2010 planting weekends
	04 - 05 September 2010
	18 - 19 September 2010

improvements to our planting technique

Over the past decade we have established a planting technique that works very well, but it would be great to speed up the process and make it easier on people, especially the younger students.

Trials with various planting implements gave some success, but results were unpredictable and mostly poorer. We are still in favour of mattocks to loosen the soil and ensure good contact with the seedling roots. The bottom line is an absolute need to maintain our high success rates!

Thorough ground preparation and weed spraying certainly helps. Recent trials with double ripping 15-20 cm apart were very promising, so we intend to use a twin-tyne ripper wherever possible this coming year.

Our inventive volunteer Alan, is working to redesign a second-hand old tree-planting machine to see if some of the flatter sites can be mechanised even further.

One significant trial last year had two school classes planting together instead of the usual one group at a time.

The 50 students worked together like clockwork, planting a remarkable 905 seedlings and covering well over ½ km! The speed of such a bigger scale operation gives everyone a tremendous sense of achievement and we'll take that approach again wherever we have sufficient adult supervision.

So 2005 promises to be an interesting year, as we work our way through various planting methods, finding foolproof techniques to suit all the different soil types and ability levels.