In collaboration with the Woodland Trust, our community forester and three volunteers spent a day at Tiroran Community Forest gathering rowan berries and downy birch seed. It's a great year for rowan and Philip, Terry, Jane and Emily managed to collect a fantastic haul - 28kg of berries! The downy birch seed looks less impressive - only 200g - but that will be sufficient to potentially grow 40,000 trees! All the seed has been packaged up and posted to Forestart who have the facilities to stratify and store the seed in optimum conditions, improving germination rates. Once the seed is at the point of germination we can receive as much ready-to-go-seed as we need and the rest can be stored, swapped, sold or donated to other nurseries or forests.
The seed gathering was part of a Woodland Trust initiative to increase the quantity of tree seed collected in the West of Scotland, including Mull.
If you would like to get involved, please contact Philip.
