Where has this year gone?! It’s August already, predictably it’s raining (at last some might say!), and so its time to fill you in on the goings on over the previous month the friendly folks at the Tree Life Centre have been up to. Now the question is where to start? We all have been taking advantage of the mainly hot and sunny weather and been very busy across the Centre, no doubt I’ve missed something in the following; the sun may have affected my memory!
Throughout the month the volunteers have been very busy mainly watering but with the lovely weather and the start of the school holidays we have had many visitors. Whilst being busy promoting the good work the Centre and the charity does to the visitors, including showing interested people around the whole site, we have been working hard to improve the visitor area, new signs, tidying it up and encouraging people to ‘go native’ and buy some trees, shrubs and wildflowers for their gardens! Part of this is we have started to sell seed packets of herb plants we have grown and soon there will also be wildflower mixes too, from seeds collected around the site. Oh and not forgetting handing out stickers to the young and not so young visitors! Elsewhere, teams of volunteers have continued to be hard at work improving the paths around the site so we can open up more of it; this also includes building fencing next to drops.
One of the bug hotels built by the students
Before the schools broke up for the summer holidays our regular visit from Sheiling School included them planting some of our wildflowers around the farm site. We hope you enjoyed your visits to us and are having fun on your summer holidays! We also held a workshop for a group of years 7 to 9 from The City Academy Bristol as part of their community project. We ran two workshop, one educational learning about native trees and the other was creative, and rather chaotic, getting them to build bug houses from recycled bird/bat boxes for them to put up around the school. Afterwards we all had pizza using the wood oven and a general explore round the site. We hope they had as much fun as we did and hopefully will see them again soon! Also, we were kindly donated a scarecrow to go on our veg patch from the guys from Warmley Park school. They created Cotton as part of their forest school and then came and paid us a visit to drop it off. So far so good, the veg is still in tact, thanks guys!
Cotton!
Along with the conservation team, we attended a local wildlife event run by the local council at a nearby flat complex to promote wildlife gardening. For it both teams produced various bird boxes, bug hotels and planters to show the residents how easy it is to help attract more wildlife into their gardens/public areas. Thank you to everyone who came out in the thunder and rain! Following on from this we now also are selling planters we have made (or to order if we have sold out!) that hold four to six plants, so if you don’t have a garden then these planters will look good on a path/drive and help add some colour to a patch!
Just some of the planters
Finally, did you know you can also hire trees from us? If you visited Bristol Harbour Festival and you saw some trees in pots around the place they may have come from us! Like the previous month we hired out some of our potted trees to help brighten up an event. If you think your event might look great with some of our potted trees dotted around the place then please do get in touch!
Phew, I told you we have been busy! There is much, much more so why not come and pay us a visit and see what we’ve been up to. Thanks for taking the time for reading the blog and we all hope you enjoy the rest of the summer!
Parish Notices:-
Throughout August we will be holding a raffle! For more details keep you eyes peeled on our Facebook and Twitter pages next week!
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