Urban Forest Maintenance Day

Yesterday the TY students in St David’s College joined me for a few hours, weeding the urban forest we planted earlier this year.

The crew of 30 or so students got stuck straight in, pulling up grass, dandelions and battling the Alexanders that had popped up through the layers of cardboard and mulch. While it’s not strictly necessary to weed the forest as there’s nothing too noxious in this area that would compete with the trees for nutrients, we did find a few of the young saplings had become buried under the grass - a combination of wind rock and shallow planting. So we rescued these, and I showed the students how to tread down the grass in rings around the trees in the unmulched areas, to prevent this happening.

This forest sits behind an existing border of non-native Cherry Laurel hedging, which we’ve left in place for now but may move in the next planting season once we have a new home for it.

The students in this college are an absolutely lovely bunch of students, and I’m looking forward to working with them more as their forest grows. You can follow their project here.

#TreesInSchools #UrbanForest #LoveNature #ForestsForNature #PlantATree