This week, I ’ave been mainly planting trees! On our Christmas visit to visit family
in England, we collected this year’s order from Martin Crawford at the
Agroforestry Research Trust. We’ve also sourced trees at local pépinières (nurseries) but they don’t do
such arcane arbres as the blue bean (Decaisnea fargesii) hence sourcing trees
from afar as well as locally.
It’s a real pleasure to convert long hours of reading,
decision making and plan drawing into digging holes: from coloured circles on
the forest garden map into tangible trees. We are starting to imagine what it might look like in five,
and then ten, year’s hence; it’s exciting.
When we returned from our seasonal travels, we quickly
planted the bare-rooted trees into some soft earth in the potager. We could’ve planted them all in the forest garden in just a
couple of hours excepting that we need to construct robust tree guards to
protect them from our Ouessant sheep, who’ll share the field for a few years
yet. 
The sheep look fluffy, act nervous but don’t let that
deceive you: they’re cunning bastards.
They’ve overcome several of my previous efforts to keep them out and
even learnt to walk on two legs in order to nibble at overhanging branches. Never mind the ring barking of trees by
rabbits and squirrels, these 
Not quite in an authentic permaculture design order, as all
the surveying should have been done before the design ‘proposal’, but we
profited from the loan of a laser level and the annual Halloween visit of our
technically-super-competent engineering friend, Kristen to create a contour map. 
The laser level was very easy to use:
up-a-bit, down-a-bit, beep, beeb, beep, take the reading. While we cooked supper, Kristen dabbled
around on the computer and produced this useful contour map (see top image). What was interesting to both
Kristen and I was that we were both massively deceived by the amount of fall
over the length of the field. That’s
to say that, by eye, we thought the difference no greater than our own height
but ended up extending the measuring rod to its limit, well over double
that.
This information will help
us in digging fish-scale swales (according to Toby Hemenway) to
keep our trees watered in the dry summers evermore typical in Brittany.
