Our Arsenal Forest in Africa is continuing to thrive as we head into 2024, even if conditions for both the workers and the trees are far from ideal at the moment.
The climate is changing fast in tropical Africa – a fact that can give our team of tree planters some major challenges. It used to be that the “big rains” would arrive regularly in April and May and the “little rains” around October-time, but over the past few years the normally reliable weather patterns have become disrupted.
Right now, it’s raining unusually heavily over in Kenya – conditions that are thought to be the result of a strong “El Nino” temperature anomaly in the nearby Indian Ocean.
This extreme level of rainfall, allied to the constant equatorial sunshine, means our neem trees are doing really well, but the weeds are also getting a boost, while the flooding that is now affecting Bore can make the roads impassable at times. Getting to the Arsenal Forest planting site is proving quite difficult for the weeders – but we know this is a challenge they will overcome. In fact, only recently members of the Bore Lions and Lionesses made it across the river that borders our plot to the north to plant more neem trees!
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
