Tree Guards: Do we need Plastic Tubes?
When you look at a field full of plastic tubes, it can be easy to see that as a disgusting man-made mess. Trees have been doing just fine on their own for hundreds of millions of years, so why go to such lengths to protect them? Shouldn’t we just plant the saplings then leave them to it?
Sadly the natural world is such an imbalance due to human intervention, that we need more human intervention to solve those problems. Over the centuries, declining forest cover, hunting, and persecution lead to the extinction of British wolves, brown bears, and lynx, meaning animals lower down the food-chain have thrived in comparison. Rabbits, hare, deer, mice, voles, moles, all wander the countryside looking for food, and due to large scale agriculture turning huge swathes of our country into “green deserts”, they are happy to find a bunch of tasty young saplings to eat.
This is one of the many reasons “natural regeneration” (the idea of just letting nature along to take its course and progress through scrubland to woodland) can take so long in some ares. If there are not enough mature pilot trees nearby, you have to wait for birds to poop out the right seeds in the right place for them to germinate. Then when some of them start to grow, you have to hope enough of them make it long enough to propagate more seeds, before too many of them are eaten by critters.
So what do foresters do about it?
Overstocking
Fencing
Natural Defences
Tubes
Overstocking is the idea of planting considerably more saplings than you need. Basically if animals damage 20% of the saplings, so what, that 80% is a good woodland. Maybe they overstocked enough that they could lose 50% or more. This gets a bit confusing when people think about “number of trees”, but it can produce good results.
Fencing can help keep browsing animals from physically getting into the saplings. No fence will be 100% effective, but it can help a lot. There’s livestock fencing to keep cows and sheep away from them, as sheep especially actively seek out saplings and prefer them to grass! This can be as simple as fence posts and barbed wire. Then there’s deer fencing, which is similar but twice as tall. Deer can jump up to 8 feet (2.5 meters) so you’ve really got to make those fences tall, and that price can be prohibitively expensive for certain projects depending on their shape and funding source. Government grants will pay you back for fencing, but programs like Woodland Trust MOREwood will not, leaving landowners stuck with the bill.
Natural Defences can play a part in protecting saplings. Anything with thorns or prickles on them, can keep some animals out of the area. Deer are pretty adventurous and will just walk straight through brambles, but at a certain point there is such a natural barrier that they physically cannot get to the saplings. We do this on most sites, planting Hawthorn, Blackthorn, and Holly around the edges of groups of trees, hoping they will provide some level of protection in future when they have grown larger.
Tubes come in many forms, from short square boxy guards for squat shrubs, to 1.2m tubes that will hopefully be too high for a deer to nibble on. These are usually plastic, but increasingly made from more sustainable materials like weatherised cardboard and biodegradable plastics.
Tubes are generally recyclable if collected up. Until recently you’d need to use services like https://www.agri-cycle.uk.com and pay to have batches of them collected, but now tube manufacturers are starting to offer their own recycling programs. Tubex are a very popular brand of tube manufacturer, you’ve probably seen them before if you’ve ever seen a light green tube, and they let buyers sign up for the recycling program, collecting the tubes after they’ve served their purpose. https://tubex.com/markets/forestry/
Then there are biodegradable plastic tubes, but the jury is out on those. They say :they break down “sooner” and its hard to tell if thats 100 years instead of 500 years. If it was going to be a few years, thety would probably say that, so we have yet to experiment with those.
We have been trying out some “spiral guards” that are like tubes but much thinner, and this specific product claims it will biodegrade in 4-5 years. They provide less protection from browsing animals but once they start to break down they can be collected up and popped in a compost pile, so the heat of the composting process can finish their breakdown.
Out cycling around the Cotswolds I noticed this contraption, which I can only assume is to protect against deer, but even if that works, isn’t doing anything against anything else, and there’s no way we can make thousands of those. Next planting season we aim to plant 100,000 trees and that would be a nightmare!
The ideal situation would be something made from tough cardboard, which will simply break down in place and not require collection. Everyone we ask about the effectiveness of cardboard guards usually has the same response: a sigh, a groan, and a list of complaints about floppy wet cardboard falling apart in the first year and losing a bunch of saplings in the process. We even had the sales people for one product telling us not to bother, suggesting we come back for the 2021 winter planting season and go with the traditional plastic tubes this season.
We’re experimenting with another brand of cardboard protectors at Hazeland Wood, a partnership project with Avon Needs Trees. We have 400 trees on their land, all protected with cardboard tubes. They’re Hazel and Hawthorn which should be fairly tough anyway, and we’ll keep an eye on how those cardboard protectors are holding up.
There are new products on the market every year, and we will continue to experiment with them as we go. If on any given site we have 50% standard Tubex tubes (that will be recycled) then 25% cardboard and 25% biodegradable, we can see how things go without fear of losing too many of our saplings that we risk or delay the success of the woodland. Over time we can increase the percentages of the tubes that are successful and within 5 years maybe we use no new plastic at all.
One product we’re keen to try out is NexGen Tree Shelters, which just finished their trials this year. They are “predominantly made from wool, together with some clever, innovative, bio-based chemistry” which sounds good to us, and come highly recommended by those in the know. Pantpurlais is keen to give them a go as they have hare and deer getting over the top of some of their tubes eating their rare apple trees! There is also Grown Green, which we will be looking into as well.
One area we are proud to have no plastic involved is our choice of mulch mats. These mats are made entirely out of hemp, and we’ve put down almost 1,000 already. Mulch mats protect the sapling from competition by grass and other weeds, meaning they get more water and nutrients from the soil. This is a very important step, but lots of people use what look like black bin bags, and that plastic litters the countryside as it degrades. As hemp is a natural product it will simply break down after 2 or 3 years, leaving no trace on the ecosystem.
Whatever happens, we will be sure to collect up all our plastic tubes for recycling, and not leave them laying round the woods like lazy foresters. We don’t want to see anything like these on our projects.
If you are near Middlesbrough and would like to help lay 1,000 mulch mats this May 29th, we could really use your help!