Trees glorious trees!

It is all rather clichéd and predictable, but we came to Lake Tungog on a mission to plant trees to sooth our brains and make us feel a little better about the world. When we got here we realised that it’s not all about planting trees. So Far we’ve been here almost 3 weeks and I chopped more things down than I’ve planted!

Let me explain…

Everyone loves tree-planting. The thing is though, once the sapling is planted, it’s far from safe -this is a tinsy tiny sapling in a big ugly world of vines. If you took a time lapse of a forest growing to speed it up, the vines would be the sprinters, and the tree saplings the marathon-runners (slow and steady). So aside from avoiding getting too dry, or too much sun, or too little sun, these little dudes also have to try to fend off the weeds, some of which have the lovely tendency of strangling them to death!

The thing is, there is plenty of funding in places like this for tree-planting, but less for forest management. So a large part of what Bro and I are doing here is silviculture, which is where we work our way through a forest area and cut down any plants (mainly vines) that are stunting the growth of the trees, and therefore preventing the progression of the forest. It’s bloomin’ knackering and requires one scary looking machete (a pedang), a knack for avoiding severing limbs, and it always results in blisters. As I’ve mentioned before, Bro and I spent much of our first week here working with locals in an area of forest that was struggling to regenerate.

We are now working our way through one of KOPEL’s regeneration areas, which is where they are trying to reforest a corridor next to the river, which used to be palm oil. The young trees here were suffocating from being over-run with vines so our job is to remove the views and clear an area at the base of each tree to basically give them a head-start. It’s very exposed, so it’s super super hot and we’ve switched to starting work at 7am to try to get a head-start on the sunshine, but it’s actually ridiculously satisfying when you finish a tree (and shout the obligatory “BE FREE!!”), and when you look back at the end of the day and see your work, you definitely feel warm-fuzzy (and not just the sweaty kind).

This is a time-lapse we took of us one morning to give you an idea …TJ’s comment when he saw it was…”look how much brighter it is! It’s because the world know’s you’re making it better”. I like to think so J

Here are some piccies of us doing warm-fuzzy sapling-planting in the nursery!