The 6th December 2024 will go down as one of our best days at Co-Treetment as we were so fortunate to have great people joining us at our field to help in planting a magnificent 1,425 trees. That means in total we now have 6,000 in the ground, near Thringstone, Leicestershire.
To be able to achieve this we had to plan meticulously, order the tree whips, the canes and the spirals. That’s just a few clicks on the keyboard, but important ones. We needed to cut the grass to make it easier to plant, measure the field for the tree locations and populate the locations with canes as markers.
The preparation of the field wasn’t helped by the recent weather or some of our second hand equipment. We overcame the challenge, we always do, with a smile, a chuckle, a few choice words, but always a commitment to move forward. Thanks go to Alexander and Darrell Taylor for preparing the field on 30th November, without that we’d definitely have struggled. Then on Thursday 5th December Simon Evans MBA and Darrell Taylor grabbed a few hours to place all the canes in position to help with planting for the teams that were to join us on the following day.
So on Friday we were delighted to welcome different customers to the site to plant trees. We started reasonably early in the morning and worked through with a break for lunch until 4pm. Through their team efforts and additional planting from the Co-Treetment team, by the end of Friday we had 1,425 new silver birch trees were occupying the field, looking great.
Thanks to our customers at Gravity Digital (Sharon Stevens-Cash), MacMartin (Claire MacDonald) and Midland Lead Ltd (Francoise Derksen) for being such great sports and getting stuck in with the planting, going above and beyond.
A definite competitive, and friendly spirit was on show, especially from the Gravity Digital and MacMartin team, team who had a similar, but definitely not identical number planters present. In the end only 1 tree separated them in terms of numbers, 137 and 136 respectively, which is all the more amazing given there were only 9 people involved in total.
With Midland Lead Ltd arriving for planting later, and fielding a team of 30, buoyed up with mince pies, tea and coffee they managed to plant 1,038 trees before heading to the local hostelry for a well deserved buffet dinner.
We are so lucky to have such wonderful customers that totally understand the importance of getting involved in their sustainability journeys, making it happen through investing their time, people and money in the activity.
Thank you all.
Simon Evans MBA
Darrell Taylor
Keith Cox
