An e-tree for Christmas
Text and photos: Kaido Einama, Reisijutud.com
Translation: Liis
Dense spruce stand in a forest section line in the process of getting overgrown. Here maybe we can find one ...
RMK, the Estonian State Forest Management Centre, offers all the opportunity to go out to fetch one’s own Christmas spruce from the forest. You can pay on the spot, and you don’t need to queue up at a paydesk in the forest to do it: just make a mobile call to a phone number.
But first some preliminaries have to be worked out on maps. We chose a familiar area for our spruce search, where we know what is privately owned forest land and what is government forest. It is of course always possible to check in the forest register database to be quite sure:
On the forest register map near Keila the green-marked areas are government owned land.
And so to a forest near Keila – on the verge of a small bog, with ditches and clearings getting overgrown with shrubs. There the smaller spruces should be growing. In government forests spruces can be cut at ditch banks, on forest section lines and in clearings under power lines, where they have no hope of growing to maturity, RMK’s web site tells us.
We had walked some ten minutes along small forest paths when we found a boar feeding ground. There had been some burrowing, but not much activity during the last few days. But soon Looduskalender’s Wild boar camera will open on this web site, with the most popular feeding ground on view.
The next forest path that we checked led to a deer feeding ground. There too all was quiet. Animals don’t like to move much in the cold. In the empty trough only some salt lumps lay around.
Further on from the feeding ground the path became more shrubby and finally we found a rather nice dense little spruce on an overgrowing forest ride. Three year old Hanna was our meter measuring stick and it was clear that the length suited too.
But first the tree had to be paid for. For a one-meter spruce the asking price was 50 Estonian krooni, so we called 900 0050 and after a recorded message explaining at length (in Estonian and Russian) about the service we were using, an SMS arrived and confirmed: the spruce was properly bought. Now we could bring out our saw.
It wasn’t really a complete e-transaction throughout, and that wasn’t needed either; spruces can be ordered from an e-shop, to be delivered at home, but now we could make the spruce-fetching trip as in the old days and honestly pay for the tree by mobile. One more novelty in our e-country.
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