Hello and welcome to our latest update for the goings on at the Tree Life Centre! An early apology for the lack of photos this month, there are only so many times you can see mud, mud and more mud let alone take pictures of it! Whilst dodging the bad weather, even having a couple of cancelled days due to the wind, we have all been extremely busy to make up for the lost time.
We also received some good news! The Centre has been lucky enough to be awarded funding (more about that in a future blog) to help improve the site, mainly focusing on the entrance area for the general public. Also, hopefully funding will be put towards new on-site activities and events. Keep your eyes peeled on our social network sites and this blog for more details in the future. It’s looking like an exciting time to be at the Centre in 2014!
Now that spring is here, in meteorological terms at least, time is running out on ordering your bare rooted trees from us. This is due to the tree’s coming out of their dormant period, and especially with the more mild winter it is happening sooner than last year. However, we may just be able to squeeze in any requests nearer the start of March. Fear not though as we also have a stock of potted trees, including our fruit trees, that are for sale and they can be planted out in their root balls instead of bare rooted. Get in touch or pay us a visit to see our stocks.
Again, with the change of season, also brings a change of gear for all of us. With the apple grafting time upon us, we will be busy grafting our own apple trees again and we are also holding an event where you can learn how to do it yourself and take away your tree for good measure! More about this later. Alongside this, volunteers will also be putting our seed growing programme for vegetables, wildflowers and herbs into force, both for our own consumption with the edible plants project, but also growing plants to sale for both the public and other community groups. If you would like to learn more about any of these processes or are interested in buying our plants then please do get in touch and get stuck in! It’s been proven that horticulture and being outside in general is good for your health and well being, so why not come down and learn something new amongst a great set of people, and feel good too!
Finally…what have we been up to this month? Well as talked about in previous blogs we have been busy supplying our lovely trees to our fellow TCV projects who have been out planting with other community groups and schools, some in partnership with Western Power Distribution. We have been giving the site an early spring clean and trying to replace and repair our storage bays, so much ruthless sorting has been taking place. It always amazes me just how much ‘stuff’ we accumulate! We try to put as much of it to good use as possible, which means some inventive projects are being thought up at the moment as to what we can do with some of it! Also, our diploma guys have been cracking on and nearing completion, with perennial weed identification the main challenge in recent weeks. They also had the new novelty of being the first students at the centre to be videoed completing tasks as part of their evidence…providing the iPad survived the wind and the rain!
Parish notices:-
As mentioned above, we are holding an apple grafting event at the Centre on Saturday 8th of March to find out more about it click here.
Our work based horticulture diploma will be re-starting again in April so if you are interested in enrolling then please do get in touch.
We can be found on both Facebook and Twitter, so like/follow us for more up-to-date news.