When we mention we're going to be planting trees we have infinite people biting our arms off to come and plant them.

When we need the help with maintenance there is a deafening silence.

If you want to chase glory, focus on saving recently planted woodlands, doing the hard but critical work of making sure these saplings live, instead of just grabbing photo ops with a spade.

Birthday drinks afterwards. Come play. https://www.protect.earth/events/sapling-guardian-day-near-radstock

Sapling Guardian Day Near Radstock — Protect Earth

We planted saplings on this site back in 2022. We're circling back to check how things are going and are organising a sapling care and maintenance volunteering day to help ensure the survival and healthy growth of these saplings. Activities include: Identifying and replacing saplings that have

Protect Earth

@Philsturgeon Make mixed events. First plant some new trees, then with so many people there, tend to the ones already planted before.

I am sure you already had this idea. :) Combi-Events can work really good.

@johnnythan unfortunately for that idea, trees are planted in winter and maintenance is done in spring and summer. Hard to mix it up with anything and seeing as it’s often on other landowners land we can’t even offer campfires or camping as a treat after the work.
@Philsturgeon yep, we have the same problem in community orchards in London. There's definitely a question of how to market maintenance days. We've been wondering whether marketing them as fun days out for the whole family or focusing on activities around the trees would work.
@brunogirin for sure, we have woodland care days, eco matting days, all sorts of attempts to call it something else with mixed results. Definitely fun for the family is a key emphasis because we’ve had kids as young as five enthusiastically running around with buckets of woodchip for hours.

@Philsturgeon

This piqued my interest as a communication problem!

I wonder if the difference is partly because most people already have some concept of "planting a tree", and that makes it easy to imagine the satisfaction of it, whereas the maintenance tasks are more amorphous in the average person's mind, and harder to imagine? I'm sure there _is_ satisfaction to be had in doing the fixes!

Maybe you already have evidence that what I'm describing isn't a factor. But if it might be, I'd maybe gather some video at the next one, of "before and after" some different fixes, following a volunteer who's commentating and enjoying it. Like "here's this little tree trying to survive, here's the problem, here's how I'm fixing it, this part was easy whereas this part was tricky, now I've finished and the tree is looked-after, yay happy tree".

I could imagine a handful of different 1-minute or 2-minute clips of different before-and-afters, "see how this little tree got some help". That's the kind of thing people like to share around whether or not it's anything to do with them, because it's comforting and cheering to see something going in the right direction. And then people who've watched the clip would have more sense of what's involved, which might help them to imagine themself joining in and giving it a try.

Last frame would have web address, and then you could add follow-on comments as appropriate, "here's the next time and date when you can have a go". (I wouldn't incorporate time & date in the actual video, because then it's a faff to change it for the next one.)

Just my 2p from event promotion in general, I could be wrong :-)

@unchartedworlds @Philsturgeon

I think more education in certainly needed?

Many folk might think you just plant a tree and it grows on its own given sufficient water/rain/sun (I admit I wasn't 100% sure myself what is involved)

@vfrmedia @unchartedworlds the description usually says what is involved, but I’m happy to go on a maintenance campaign on socials. Comically watering isn’t one of the activities but weeding, laying mulch matts, straightening guards and stakes when they’ve fallen over, that sort of thing.

@Philsturgeon

I think all those activities could well lend themselves to a nice cheering "before and after" :-)

I'm also thinking, I bet there's tons of knowledge you take for granted, and regular volunteers would also know, that might be new & interesting to a non-gardener. Like why is mulching good? How long would a little tree typically need support from a stake before it's strong enough on its own? Etc. Maybe a curious person who knows nothing about it could come along and give you some ideas of what they know nothing about, and that could get explained in the video :-)

By the way I forgot to say, part of the reason I have a sense of this genre is there are YouTubers who basically just do "before, during, after" various types of indoor or outdoor cleanups. It's a very popular genre!
Some have thousands of followers just for that & their commentary. See e.g. "Midwest Magic Cleaning", who combines makeovers of overcluttered/dirty houses with giving info about ADHD, depression, hoarding disorder etc, as well as explaining how he does the cleaning.

Come to think of it, you might want to watch a couple of YouTube vids from that tradition to get ideas - e.g. it's traditional to conclude with a slow transition from a before photo to an after photo, to help people to relish what's been accomplished.

@vfrmedia

@unchartedworlds @vfrmedia yeah we explain all this in the event pages and again in person with the volunteers. We’ve had hundreds come out for maintenance but nowhere near the thousands we’ve had for planting.

Educating society on why maintenance is a worthy activity is a huge job. People want something to brag about and “trees planted” metric carries more weight.

Changing this would take decades, and cost so much money we probably could have bought more land to restore.

@Philsturgeon @vfrmedia

Yes, cannot deny that the communication side is a whole load of work in itself!

Anyway wishing you luck, hope you get a good lot of enthusiastic people coming over :-)

@Philsturgeon
I know, and we only have 40 little oaks.
@PatrickOBeirne @Philsturgeon my rescued truly little oaks planted by squirrels in really stupid places. Will eventually plant somewhere along the cycle path woods behind my path where the crows and squirrels and pigeons and little birds live
@Philsturgeon - Isn't that what City Planners do grabbing photo ops with a spade while we plan the trees.
@atlovato indeed. We get corporate volunteers actually paying us to come out and plant but we end up having to pay out of a tiny budget to do the maintenance.
@Philsturgeon But isn't success in life a direct function of virality ?
@tchauhan I have no idea what this means but I would like people to help with woodland maintenance instead of just shoving them in the ground and assuming that’s the end of it.
How a £1.5bn ‘wildlife-boosting’ bypass became an environmental disaster

A14 in Cambridgeshire promised biodiversity net gain of 11.5%, but most of the 860,000 trees planted are dead. What went wrong?

The Guardian
Phil Sturgeon 🌳🚵⚓️ (@philsturgeon.com)

This article was close to getting it, but misses the point massively. The problem isn’t the tree planting. The photos in it show 50% survival rate. The problem is consistently building massive damaging roads, shoving in some empty ponds full of tyre particles, and pretending that’s net gain. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

Bluesky Social
@Philsturgeon 100%. One of my favourite gardeners is John Little, he is always talking about maintenance -- in fact, has set up a website Care Not Capital, about investing in gardeners and management rather than just capital projects
@Philsturgeon Have you been planting the trees neatly in rows, like in a tree plantation?

@JanetGrBr timber plantations plant in rows for easier harvesting. Reforestation projects only plant in rows when required to by strict government grants to meet the maths on exact spacing and density.

When no such requirements are in place we improve asthetics with random planting, but none of the birds or other wildlife care at all either way.

It’s only people that find it upsetting, and they’re unaware how much the woodland will random up over time as it matures, thins, and self seeds.

@Philsturgeon Yes. Important

Where is Radstock? It would be very cool to have that information a bit more prominantly for those of us with a "yes, i will help" frame of mind

Is it in England?

@worik we focus on local volunteers so if you’ve never heard of a place you’re probably far enough away that it would involve quite a few emissions to get there. This is always fine for planting but it’s an issue for maintenance. Hitting up the local FB groups, etc.