It’s difficult to photograph thirty newly planted saplings in a “meaningful” way so here is my best effort, taken in a short burst of sunlight in a frustratingly wet day.

Despite a good forecast, the weather has been resolutely moody. Although there have been odd bursts of sunshine, by the time we’ve finished the other tasks we’ve been getting on with while it rains, the rain has started again so no more tree planting has been done today, despite our best intentions.

Still, the trees are able to be left for a week without planting and tomorrow’s forecast is fried eggs all day so we’re hopeful that we will get the remaining 15 of this batch in then. We’d better or I am going to be furious, given that we’ve got plans on Saturday and I’ve got a work commitment on Sunday (gggrrrr – so much for holidays eh?)

The sharp one is a beech. We’ve deliberately avoided planting in rows in the hope that it won’t look too “planted” so we did it by pacing randomly around the area then digging.

Neither of us can believe we’ve actually managed to achieve this. We’d been very downhearted early in the summer when we stood in the field and it was a tangle of weeds and brambles that were waist height. At that point we thought we’d never get it sorted. We hatched all sorts of plans to try to get it under control, everything from getting a local bloke to paddock his donkeys in there to begging a local farmer to come and mow it for us with a tractor. We'd all but given up on this part of the plan for this year, thinking we'd have to wait until 2008 before we could put it into place.

Then we decided to scrape together the money to buy a small tractor mower and do it ourselves. DM has done a fabulous job, taking it in small sections, cutting down all of the big stuff with shears then mowing, making the section mowed bigger each time. Now it’s pretty much all grass and the only brambles are on the margins.

We’re going to try to establish a small but proper wild flower meadow on part of it but we needed to get rid of the wilderness first.

Without DMs hard work over the summer, we’d be nowhere with this part of the plan so he’s my hero!

Last year, grrrrr cheese!