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One Year on - an Update on Charlotte's Wood

Last year, you helped us plant more than 1,500 new trees in Charlotte’s Wood with our friends at Creating Tomorrow’s Forests. This ‘Growvember,’ we’re going bigger and better, so let’s see how the reforestation is going today.

This month we did our final visit of the year measuring trees at Charlotte's Wood. The trees have grown since August and most of them still had their leaves. The cherry tree leaves have gone a beautiful red colour, the birches yellow, and the smaller black poplars have lost their leaves.

There were still butterflies on the site, a ragged robin was still flowering, and we spotted a lot of harlequin ladybirds. The warm weather appears to have delayed autumn on site, and all the rain has refilled the pond and there were some pondskaters whizzing about.

The willow trees have had a particularly good year and now that we have a complete year of tree growth rates, we will have a look at whether our Miyawaki trees are growing faster than conventional tree plantations. We recorded an update video to give you a better idea of how the site is looking.

We have started work on our Devon biodiversity site, by taking an eDNA sample and beginning some of the pond creation work. On this site we have sampled the soil for invertebrates and fungi and the sample has been sent to NatureMetrics for processing. We will use this as a baseline to see what species are present before works commenced. We will be planting the trees there this season and we are in the process of finalising the tree species that will be used.

The hedges are already benefiting from our management approach as we have not cut them back this year and they are flourishing. Over time this approach should allow the hedgerow to grow and mature and we will enhance it by planting additional fruit bearing trees. 

Find out more about Creating Tomorrow’s Forests’ amazing reforestation work here, and make sure you fill up your baskets this Growvember, so we can plant even more trees!