Last week it was tree planting at Grapes Hill Community Garden and today a group of us planted a mixed hedge of Holly, Blackthorn, Hawthorn, Crab Apples, Field Maple and Hazel along the edge of the Norwich Community Agriculture site at Postwick, just beyond the east of Norwich. We also planted a single Red Oak.
The hedge will provide a windbreak to the west of the field we are renting, which will be used to grow a variety of market garden crops from this summer onwards.
Carrying the trees in.
Planting instructions.
Deciding on the hedge line.
Removing top of turf (to reduce competition with hedge).
Yesterday we planted fruit trees and bushes at Grapes Hill Community Garden, including six apples, two pears, two cherries, a quince, a plum, a medlar, a fig, three grapevines and various soft fruit.
View the complete gallery of tree planting pictures here.
Group photo - planting the first tree
Planting the Medlar
Planting apple trees
Planting the quince
The tree roots are soaked in water prior to planting.
This month's website of the month is Simon Knott's The Norfolk Churches Site, which has excellent photographs and descriptions of Norfolk's churches - 868 at time of writing.
The site is a wonderful resource and I often visit when I've passed or stopped at a church during a cycle ride in the Norfolk countryside, or linked to from one of the church websites I've built.
For forays south of the border there is a companion site of Suffolk Churches.
The Government is planning a massive sell off of our national forests, which could be auctioned and fenced off, run down, logged or turned into golf courses and holiday villages.
We can't let that happen. We need to stop these plans. National treasures like the The Forest of Dean, Sherwood Forest and The New Forest could be sold off. Once they are gone, they will be lost forever.
Design Different is now featured on the NWES website as a Success Story.
NWES is an organisation that offers free business start up advice in the East of England. It provides an excellent five day course known as Best Start which provides the skills and knowledge to develop a business plan and manage and grow a business. I can recommend the course very highly.
See the NWES website for more details of this and other courses.
I spent much of the weekend clearing bindweed roots and pruning Buddleia bushes at Grapes Hill Community Garden, ready for planting fruit trees and bushes on Sunday 23rd January. Sunday's turnout was especially good, with about twenty of us, including members of the Norwich Community Green Gym. The sun even shone!
The nursey is superb - lots of varieties of tree, including local varieties of apples and the national collection of fig trees. The staff are very helpful and knowledgeable too. As if this isn't enough, the nursery's location next to Hales Hall and its beautiful thatched barn is great too.
We will return late next week to make our purchases, including apples, pears, an apricot, cherries, a fig, a medlar, a quince and some soft fruit bushes and canes.
Fig tree
A proper sort of nursery like Reads is a real antidote to many garden centres, which sell fewer and fewer plants and seem to be just plant supermarkets. You can find more good nurseries on the Norfolk Nursery Network website. I will certainly try to visit more of them during the year.
