City of Trees are a community forest charity for the Greater Manchester area that between October and March every year, organise community tree planting sessions while also carrying out maintenance of their sites. Despite Storm Bert bringing in rain and wind, a group of maybe around 10 or so volunteers local to the area rolled up their sleeves to get planting, including 2 very stubborn Goodgymers Hannah and Ben.

Fueled by tea, coffee, the good biscuits, and endless anecdotes about jaffa cakes, we planted 180 trees in total across the three hour period. This included oak, silver birch, hazel and hawthorn, with some of the smaller shrub-like trees such as hawthorn making up the edge and the larger trees more central. As inspiration, just 20 or so yards away was another area planted 20 years ago by Red Rose Forest (a previous incarnation of City of Trees) and they looked to be doing very well!

The planting required digging a small hole to cover the tree whip roots and filling back in with the tree whip upright, ensuring the upper stem was not submerged at all. We compacted the soil (aka mud) to ensure no air pockets remained before covering with a square of mulch mat held down with bamboo pegs (apparently quite expensive). A major activity was the wheelbarrowing of the pile of woodchip back and forth to cover the mulch mat and mound around the tree whip while not covering the stem, enabling water retention and to prevent surrounding grass or weed growth..

Once all the tree whips were in the ground, successfully surrounded by mulch mat and mulch/woodchip, we said our goodbyes with more rain coming down. With mud caking the volunteers, laundry and a cup of tea was certainly the next port of call.

City of Trees also arrange tree maintenance, something as or if not more important than putting them in the ground in the first place. We will be back to help with maintenance of the young trees and also for the more mature trees nearby to build a truly bio-diverse habitat for wildlife and to give something back to nature.

Maybe by then, we'll even have some Goodgym outdoor clothing too.