Despite the very cold temperatures of recent days our children were thrilled to spot some positive signs of spring in our woods this week! The beautiful sunshine emphasised the different shades of green starting to appear all around.

We are very grateful to Aldo for making a lovely new sign to go beside the fruit trees in our orchard in the walled garden. Amos helped the children find a good spot to put it up. Our apple trees are already covered in blossom and there are leaves on the pears , plums and cherries. The children are hoping to be able to harvest some fruit next week!

We spent this morning in Gillies Hill Community Woodland tapping birch trees and harvesting birch sap with Amos. This was a fantastic opportunity for our children to learn about the changes spring brings to the woods and also to understand more about different types of trees and how to identify birch trees by their distinctive silvery white bark. Amos showed us how he drilled a small hole in the tree to let the sap come out and we watched as it started to drip. The children were so excited that they wanted to try catching the sap on their tongues and told us it tasted amazing!
We learned that birch trees are better at producing sap than most other trees as we tried tapping a willow tree and found that it didnt drip at all. We tied milk cartons to the birch trees to catch the sap and when we checked later it was nearly half full.
Thanks for a great day Amos 😊