A couple of days out at Dundreggan

Yesterday and today I was lucky enough to tag a ride along to Dundreggan with the TFL staff, who were all over there for a staff meeting.  Yesterday I entertained myself by setting up shared printing, via a MAC, to a windows laptop, and with a few other IT bits and pieces, while the staff meeting took place.  Today I gratefully gave a hand to Dan and Colin who were setting out plots in the new planting area, to be set aside for ‘experiments’.

The aim of the ‘experiments’ is to determine whether different planting conditions aid the growth of the newly planted trees.  The plots that I’ll be most interested in are those using soil samples containing fungal mycelium.  The more I read about fungi and their place within ecosystems, the more I discover that it seems trees (and other plants) derive huge benefit from them.  Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) is well known to form mycorrhizas (translates to ‘fungi root’, where a plant root becomes sheathed with mycelium to form a symbiotic relationship between the two) with Birch trees, one of the trees that will be planted in the planting area.

The planting site is at roughly 400m.  Allan tried to take us up in the 4 wheel drive pickup, but that couldn’t find its way through the first increasingly large snow drifts on the track on the way up.  So, after a rethink Allan and Steve picked us up in the Argo.  Woaw, another big kid adventure.  We all hung on whilst Allan negotiated enormous near vertical drifts, taking us teetering over the edges of huge snow formed chasms, eventually getting us to the gate of the planting site.  From there we had to carry our stuff in because, due to the snow, we couldn’t get the gate open.