Introduction

The trees that were originally planted at Corehead were protected with plastic tree-tubes. The trees are now matured to a degree where the tubes can be removed. In previous sessions volunteers had liberated the trees and had stored collected tubes in large 'FIBC' bags. These planting sites were not accessible by even an ATV so the task was to shuttle the bags down to a drop location where the bags could be collection by a vehicle.

Task

On the day there were around 30 volunteers, we split into 3 groups tackling different areas. I joined the Tweedhope team. It was around 600m between the collection point and the drop zone but weighted down by the bags and in the blistering hot sun it felt a lot further! The bags with their payloads were pretty heavy and quite bulky/cumbersome which made for an awkward combination. To make matters worse, the bags themselves had degraded and so were splitting apart throughout the process. In some cases the handles completely came away from the sack which meant that we had to return to these with another unloaded bag.

We typically carried two bags down per shuttle which was just about bearable. Since the task was made challenging because of the unweildy nature of the bags, Some volunteers in the group had the ingenious idea of resting a stick across their shoulders and carrying the plastic in the style of a milk-maid. Somehow I never found a suitable stick but I vowed that if I ever volunteer for this task again I would bring some kind of stick so that I could rig up something like this too.

Notes

• Plastic tree guards which need to be removed should be logged with the #plotthatplastic project: https://www.forestplasticsworkinggroup.co.uk/plotthatplastic