It has started! For the first time this new planting season, we put spade to soil to put new roots in the ground! And it felt good!
Now that it has happened and is happening let’s look at what Protect Earth plans to do this coming planting season.
Planting by numbers
Projects are coming in fast and thick! The plan where we stand today is that Protect Earth will be planting 31,800 saplings over the winter months! This is a 24% increase from what was achieved last year.
All this woodland creation will see us active in England and Wales. A third of the planned projects are within or reasonably close to the capital. Twenty-two per cent of this year’s project locations are in the south-west.
We have projects in the West Midlands, West Wales, Mid-Wales, and North Wales too! The final two locations, Mid-Wales and North Wales, are larger projects, with the number of trees being planted stretching into the tens of thousands this season alone! Aside from the number of trees being planted, these two projects are particularly close to our hearts as they are owned and managed by Protect Earth to be kept as woodlands in perpetuity. In later blogs, we will discuss these projects - their size, our plans for planting, and long-term plans/ hopes. Here are the working plans today - in Welsh and English.
Other activities
When the charity was founded, our single goal was to plant oodles of trees. We knew there was more to be done than planting trees, but that first step was a simple activity that we could do, and we could show progress with the “number of trees” increasing year-on-year as a line graph. That now feels too simplistic, and while we love getting out into the fresh air and planting trees all over the UK, we do a lot more.
Beyond planting woodlands, we’ve been creating wildlife corridors (hedgerows and shelterbelts) on farms, sowing wildflower meadows, and increasingly, Protect Earth is restoring woodlands where poor management or disease has been knackering things beyond a level the woodland can recover by itself. Each of these ecosystems positively affects the environment differently, attracts unique life, and works together to feed off each other, achieving the biodiversity sorely lacking in the UK.
Some plants and animals have unnaturally migrated to the UK and can run amok without competition or predators, causing biodiversity to collapse and threatening species. Starting last year and in the future, Protect Earth is committed to removing invasive species and reducing the harm invasive species have.
Your donations directly support these activities. We are introducing new metrics to complement our tree-planting numbers each year. These numbers include what we have done this season and what we expect to complete.
Land under direct management: 163 acres (up 104 acres from 2022/23)
Acres of wildflower meadow sown: 0 (down two acres from 2022/23)
Ancient Woodland Restoration: 60 acres (up 55 acres from 2022/23)
That ancient woodland restoration is particularly exciting because it covers work done in our Cornish community woodland High Wood and on council land in London.
How you can get involved
There are always ways that you can get involved in what we are doing, and we’d love to have you become a closer member of our community.
Keep an eye out for events that may be happening near you. If you’re part of a corporate team and think your team would benefit from spending some time outdoors planting trees, please get in touch with us.
If you have some land in need of rewilding/agroforestry assistance, then let’s have a chat. We offer help to smaller holders for free, and larger landowners are asked for voluntary contributions to help us keep staff paid.
And finally, we also have some different funds you can donate to help with land purchasing or biodiversity projects that otherwise lack funding.