Pal, lets shift these trees

Firstly, sorry for the terrible pallet pun! That one definitely deserves a groan!

A group of GoodGym pals met on a September Saturday to help Hackney community group the Tree Musketeers look after the young trees in their nursery.

Several of the group had already met up to run or volunteer at the nearby parkrun on Hackney Marshes, ending with grabbing a slice of cake to celebrate a regular runner's 85th birthday! Impressive!

GoodGym visit the Tree Musketeers every month, and they always save up the heavy duty jobs for us! This month they had a task which needed lots of pairs of hands, so they were really grateful that GoodGym could help out.

The group are trying to avoid a tree disease called phytophthora, which is spread by spores which travel in standing water. If a tree gets infected, the disease rots the roots, killing the plant. So to protect their amazing collection of young trees, the group wanted to prevent the disease reaching the nursery by getting rid of any areas where water can pool.

The GG group split into two and set to work creating a better drainage area for two groups of potted trees. This involved moving all the tress and the pallets they rest upon, and then ripping up layers of felt and tarpaulin from underneath, before bringing back all the pallets and pots. As the nursery is home to hundreds of trees, this is a bigger job than it sounds! We had to enlist the help of multiple trollies to carry trees, pallets, old felt and big metal water butts.

After two hours of hard work, the trees were all neatly returned to the correct spots, with better drainage and no risk of standing water - hopefully keeping them all free from the dreaded disease.

We will be back at the Tree Musketeers next month on the 26th October so hope to see you there!