So we soon learned as many hands made light work yesterday removing tree shelters on The Cluster. Done alone, it can be a slightly soul destroying task. Done as part of a group and it immediately becomes tolerable… enjoyable even as you work together to liberate each tree from its outgrown PPE.
This time our volunteers were an enthusiastic group of Raleigh International alumni, some of whom hadn’t seen one another since their scientific expedition to Indonesia, back in ’86.
With their help, we managed to remove, separate, and sort out several hundred tree shelters, ties and stakes for recycling and reuse elsewhere on The Cluster.
The visual difference to the landscape was immediate, as was the very satisfying feeling you always get from ‘tidying up’!
Tubex sells tree shelters (tubes) in packs of five – ranging from smaller to larger in diameter so that they slot inside one another – and this is how they’d like them returned for recycling.
Our ‘that’s interesting…’ observation of the day was that most of the reusable tree shelters were the largest size; reusable because they could be removed intact from saplings that had failed. The smaller sizes more often than not, had to be slit to be removed from still-flourishing trees. Is this a common trend? If so, why bother with the largest sizes at all? Is it merely a P&P convenience? (Off to research…)
Many thanks to Jeremy and his Raleigh International group for making a real difference on the ground!
Liz
The Heggs-Castle Renaturing Project 