Harvest festival

For some reason many moons ago when we (worship committee at church) were talking about harvest festival this year it seemed a good idea to take the topic of trees – just for a change, you know!
Anyway, my dad and his partner are involved with forestry stuff in Wales so I suggested that they might be able to come and do something for us and this was taken as a good idea. I contacted them and they agreed, so we left it that I’d tell them more when I knew more… Nothing more was said about harvest festival, so nothing more was done…
Then on Wednesday or Thursday of last week I had an email form the minister saying that I had offered to do a talk on trees and could I make it all-age and do it on Sunday in the harvest festival service please? 😯 Errm, no I didn’t!
Obviously too late for my dad to come but I managed to get him to email me some info, then we all sat up late making lists of interesting things we get from trees that we could find about the house. Collected them all together and sorted from most unexpected (things like aspirin, chocolate and moisturiser) to most obvious (wooden toys etc) so that I could get them out a few at a time and ask what they had in common… then the minister introduced my section of the service as “Katy will now talk to us about trees” 🙄 ho hum!
Anyway, it worked okay, even though the element of surprise was now missing *sigh* and after that I talked a little about good forestry practice, clear fell versus continuous cover and so on and got the children to sit very close together on the floor and then try to grow up and spread out their arms without moving their feet – demonstrated beautifully the necessity for thinning as they clung to one another and fell over!

Later in the service we also had a talk about hardwood trees and heartwood/sapwood. It was really interesting to see that a coconut tree has no heartwood (because it’s really closer to being a grass, with a hollow stem) and that the wood in the centre is totally different to the wood near the edge. The speaker brought in three planks, one from centre, one from edge and one from in between, and showed us that the centre is very light (pulpy rather than solid) while the wood at the edges is incredibly hard and heavy. In fact the centre plank would float with 3/4 of it out of water, while the outer wood sinks!

Not sure exactly what it had to do with harvest festival (other than general awe at and care for creation) but it was a good service, with lots of learning thrown in 🙂