Specialbranch had their regular stall at Seedy Sunday, the annual swap/ 'green' gathering, held at Brighton BHASVIC every February.
We had a very busy time selling trees, giving advice, networking and advertising ourselves to the public.
Lots of our volunteers joined us behind the stall to help out and make it a thoroughly enjoyable experience, aided by copious supplies of biscuits.

Now is the time to check our stratification boxes. We examine all the seeds we collected last year to check if any signs of germination have occurred.

The volunteers found a record 10 bags with very good signs of early growth on our first inspection, even with very cold weather in the ascendancy.

All of the germinated seeds were then delicately transferred into seed trays, covered with a little soil and put outside with some weather/mice protection on top. Finally, we recorded all the details in our plant 'bible'. Hopefully this year will provide us with plenty of fresh plantlets, to replace the now rather depleted sales beds.

We have now settled back to our regular maintenance jobs. 
These include pruning our hedgerows, coppicing the hazel area, cutting back the willow and gently pruning the fruit bushes.
​There are still a few more jobs, including raised bed maintenance, new gates, new posts and fruit tree pruning to be done before mid-february, when the transplanting season begins. Not long till Spring!

The new year brings more orders. The 'sales' stock is now rather depleted.The latest orders have now led to rather large bare patches across the site. The customer orders are put immediately into bags before their transplantation to holding beds, awaiting customer collection.
The site looks tidy, but devoid of saplings.

One last job; preparing a selection of plants for our stand at Brighton's 'Seedy Sunday' fair in February.