Haydon Bridge

In July the landowner reported that the trees were doing alright, despite the prolonged dry spell. She was concerned that the leaves were already turning brown so we went to look for ourselves.

We were pleasantly surprised to find a survival rate of 95% in the first field and 96% in the second, although this was mainly thanks to our restock in March and the maintenance we had carried out at the same time. The new trees seem to have established well despite the drought this summer, and most of the older trees were well out of their guards and growing strongly. The site had received some rain, unlike our sites in the south, and this has clearly made a difference.

During our restock visit in March we planted 200 trees with help from a corporate group of 12 volunteers from Rheal Superfoods and a representative from Ecologi, one of our funding partners. Together with our team leader, the landowners and their daughter, they tidied up stakes and removed grass from the tubes around half the existing trees, as well as planting the new saplings. A huge thank you to everyone who volunteered, and to the landowners for hosting.

The landowners are happy to let the western edge grow by itself, as that area is sparsely planted at the moment, a nice little experiment to see what nature will do. We’ll keep an eye on it, and check how it is doing when we return for our scheduled survey next year.

To keep mileage down, we sent a local friend of the charity to check out how our trees are getting on. Despite the long hot summer, we only lost 10% of the saplings this year. That’s 45 out of 470 in the top field and 25 from 250 in lower field.

Both areas have been fenced off from the sheep with a wide margin to let natural regeneration take place and the landowners have also replaced dead trees with small saplings e.g. oaks, hawthorn and holly that they find growing in other parts of the field, and replant before the sheep get them. The alder like the damper area of the top field and the the landowners replanted a few willow in that section last autumn to fill any gaps.

The landowners told us they have named the surprisingly tall and healthy oak sapling “Phil” in honour of our chairman, and it is now nearly 8ft tall!

Our surveyor took the excuse to cycle out from Newcastle along the River Tyne, a ride he would have done regularly when living in Gateshead. The weather was beautiful and the river was stunning, although quite overrun with Himalayan Balsam.

Our planting site in Haydon Bridge was right at the top of the hill, where we got to work counting and recording notes on how our saplings were doing. The oaks, usually taking a few years to come out of their guards, were already poking out the top. One of them was already taller than our surveyor, which is a much faster rate of growth than normal for oak saplings!

Only losing 24% of them despite the long thick grass and sunny hilltop was a big win, because our survival goal is 80%, so 76% is a great first effort. We’ll come back with more trees and get some weeding done to give our trees a good chance of survival in 2025.

We had planned this as a two-day event but we managed to complete the job in one day as we had a good turnout of volunteers. We planted the trees and shrubs in three areas of varying size across the site. There were some small areas of semi-natural ancient woodland nearby so this planting helped to link some of them. Perhaps this volunteer describes the day best; the flapjack handmade by the landowners certainly made an impression!

“Everything went well. Info email allowed me to find the event and there was a flag outside to inform me that I was at the right place. Those running the event were very welcoming and explained the tasks clearly for a complete novice. The weather stayed good, all the volunteers worked well, there was coffee and FLAPJACK so we got all the tasks done within a day.”