Alders

Friday, 3 March 2023 at 20:30

There's an important spawning beck which runs into our water in the Dales. The environment is pristine and the stream hosts small fish, crustacean and insect life of great variety. The Club is part of an ongoing project designed to maintain and develop both the stream and its banks. Maintaining the banks in turn means planting trees. Trees will provide shade for the watercourse; trees will host terrestrial insects; the roots of trees will help stabilise bits of banking (once the sheep have been kept away from the channel). In addition, any brash from the trees - twigs, dead branches - will get into the edges of the flow and provide additional cover for fish and insect life. And so it was that a large half-dozen of us gave up a couple of hours this morning to inspect saplings that had already been planted (which among other things meant removing the protective plastic spirals you can see in the image) and to set out around 200 alder whips. It was a grand morning's work - one of the best antidotes I know to computer screens and the racket of the quotidian world.