Thank you to the Priory Medical Group volunteers for visiting Ingram Valley Farm in their spare time to help remove 1,672 plastic tree guards as part of their green initiative.
1,672 tree guards were removed from a 5 year old hedgerow, after they had done their job of protecting the young trees from deer and rabbits to now help the trees thrive and grow. The hedge is now flourishing with an abundance of wild roses, providing beautiful pink flowers, followed by red rose hips that the birds, small mammals and wildlife love. The volunteering group was initiated by Mike Appleton – leader of the “Plastic Free Woodlands” project, Rebecca Wilson – business partner at Ingram Valley Farm and Dr. Andrew Duggan – partner at the Priory Medical Group, as part of their green initiative campaign to reduce the amount of single-use plastic in the National Park.
Twenty one volunteers from the Priory Medical Group came to the farm, in their spare time, to help remove the tree guards which are now ready for collection via tubex.com.
Ingram Valley Farm Safaris are very supportive of the campaign and the team are now looking at naturally biodegradable alternatives to plastic tree guards for protecting trees and the environment with Newcastle University.
The thousands of guards the volunteers had collected is only a small percentage of the plastic tree guards in the countryside and the volunteers have kindly offered to do even more in the future with the team here at Ingram and in other parts of the countryside.
It is time to rethink about the material used for tree guards especially with the Labour government’s plan to plant 2 billion trees over 20 years. With Newcastle University the farm hopes to find some naturally biodegradable tree guards for the future.
A big thank you to the Priory Medical Group for all their help with this plastic free tree guard movement and to Dr. Andrew Duggan and Ingram Valley Farm for taking the lead on this with Mike Appleton from the Yorkshire Dales Millenium Trust (YDMT) who is leading the “Plastic Free Woodlands” project.
Facts about tree guards:
- The light green corrugated guards are made from polypropylene.
- The mesh guards are made from HDPE.
- There are a tiny amount of spiral guards for bigger trees on the farm. These are made from PVC and will be used for skyrises for ants.
- The Tubex recycling scheme accepts HDPE and Polypropylene but not PVC.
- When moving tree guards we always check that there are no birds first. We tend to remove tree guards at the end of the breeding wader season, most curlews have fledged by then. We then plant more trees in the Autumn months.
- One of our favourite podcasts to listen to is ‘The Sustainabilitree Podcast’:
Thank you for helping out with the project… Last year we recycled 700000 guards across around 20 hubs. This year we have 24 hubs so who knows how many more we can collect this year!
Mike Appleton
