The handy extra income will be used to buy presents for the kids (typically exercise books and pens for schoolwork) or for a Christmas day feast – most often this will be maize flour porridge (called “Wari” in Swahili) with either a nice roast duck, goose or even turkey.

Ducks, geese and turkeys are farmed in Bore and fattened up for the festive period, providing a high-protein Christmas dinner. One day’s weeding work will buy you a nice plump duck for the family meal.

The original 

Above is the entrance to our first site, which was completed with the 39,000 trees that we started planting in 2021/22, and you can see in the background just how established that forest is, with trees over five metres tall. Members of our Bore Lions and Lionesses pose in front of the entrance, and within the site there are not only thousands of trees, there is also a football pitch where both of our teams train – growing their reputation and nurturing talent!

Also, you can see our Lions and Lionesses in the original forest among these very impressive trees.

Second helping

After our first site was full of flourishing neem trees, we embarked on our second site at the beginning of last season, another 12,500 trees in total – and here are our football teams among the foliage, which as you can see has grown remarkably quickly in the last year.

We grow again 

And here are our Lions and Lionesses in the Bore nursery, where the saplings are grown, ready to be planted out on our new Arsenal Forest after the site has been fully weeded and is ready for planting. More neem trees will populate this site – which will hold another 14,500 trees – which will be interspersed with guava for an immediate crop the people in Bore can sell immediately.

And those incredible numbers once again... by the end of the 2025/26 season, our matchday programme replanting scheme will have covered 66 acres with 66,000 dense, carbon-hungry and wildlife-friendly neem trees. That’s the equivalent of 37 Emirates pitches – just imagine that!