I’ve spent the last few weeks riding from the north of Slovakia to the middle of Croatia, dodging COVID-19 red zones, sleeping in my tent saving money for trees, all to get to a half-triathlon called the Zadar Half Ironman.
Despite running with all the speed and elegance of a newborn calf, I managed to complete the 2km Swim in 42min, 90km bike in about 2hr45min, and 21km run in about 2hr20min, putting me in at 6hr9min, just 9 minutes shy of my goal!
The fundraising target for this was £2,000 and we’re up to £1,185. If you could post this on your social media we could get some one-off donations from your friends we can still get this up to the target!
In other news, Gary Hockin (our very first VIP patron!) ran an auction, selling off his collection of PHP elephants! This is a software programming thing, which means nothing to a lot of people, but if you happen to write PHP this was a very big deal, and it raised £1,000! This was amazing, unplanned, and I cannot thank Gary enough. He’s going to be at some of our planting sessions this winter with his Camper Van, so say thank you when you meet him!
All of this money goes straight into the pot, along with your Patreon money, and will be used to decrease the amount of debt we need to find from the banks.
Buying our own land
Last month I wrote about all the various lines of credit that were not going to work out: Ecology Building Society, Triodos Capital Raising, and a few high street banks that weren’t interested in doing anything beneficial for the environment, only lending to housing developers… 🤦♂️
Frustratingly we have no new news on this. The Triodos “Business Lending” department said they’d be in touch weeks ago, and despite several emails and calls from me chasing them on this, they are completely ghosting us. It’s wildly unprofessional and I’m getting rather frustrated with them.
I’m also chasing AMC and the Bristol building society who said they’d love to talk, and failed to phone after agreeing to do so. I know that during COVID times are confusing and busy, but I’m really struggling to get these people to do their jobs.
Still, whilst our land might now not come in time to plant the 30,000 trees we wanted to plant this winter, there is other good news.
Land Owner Projects Overfloweth
Dyrham is still looking good for 3,000 trees in early December, EIA pending but seems like there’s no reason for it to be rejected.
Wales is looking good for 1,800 trees. We won’t be needing an EIA for this project, and if the initial round of trees go well, we’ve agreed to plant another 3,000 on an adjacent field this winter too.
We’re up to 8,000 trees this Winter now, but we’ve got backing for 30,000 from our tree funding partners, so… we’re chasing all sorts of leads. 10ish acres in Cornwall, another few acres nearby the Dyrham project, we’re going to see how close we can get to that 30,000 number this winter, land or no land!
There’s a few small fields nearby our Dyrham project that we might be able to talk the owners into selling or planting, so this money will either go on that, or will sit around acruinig in the bank account until we get the big land, even if we don’t get to plant that until next October.
We’ll keep you updated the whole way of course, and I’m so excited we’re getting close to planting season. I’m about to hop on a train back to the UK, quarantine for two weeks, then by mid-November I’ll be cycling around to all these land owner projects to get working on the “Before” photos and drone footage, and preparing the land for planting in Dyrham in December. 😎
— Phil