Six of us turned out today and we went back to the new glade that we have been working on and made it bigger.

Warwickshire Wildlife Trust have suggested that we need to make the glades as big as possible. The reason for this is that we need to get as much sunlight on the ground to encourage wild flowers to grow, as well as grass. This will then attract different types of insects, which in turn will attract different types of wild birds and mammals. The more diverse the greenway becomes, the more interesting it will be. At the moment it is just dead and spindly trees with nothing growing on the ground. If we can eventually get a good wide grassy path then hopefully the greenway will be able to accommodate walkers, cyclists and horse-riders without churning up the soggy narrow path that we currently have.

The glade that we are working on at the moment.

As you can see from previous pictures from the same angle in the last few blogs, we are getting a bit braver with our cutting back. We really need to push the trees back and get the bare earth drenched in sunshine.

Now then – stumps!!! I think we all stumbled on the tree stumps today and it was like six drunken sailors at times.

A stump that is cut at ground level.

A stump that we will trip over.

I know it’s a pain and I keep banging on about it. But if we cut the trees down at ground level, it will save having to cut them again, or worse people tripping over them, or even worse the brush-cutter hitting them when they start to sprout shoots and breaking.

We also pushed on with the path widening and put up a few insect houses.

Good day today with quite a bit done. Well done all that turned out.

Next workdays are:

Tuesday 22nd 1pm to 3pm working on the same glade. We need to cut back more trees and remove a big clump of bramble.

Sunday  27th 11am to 1pm depending on where we are with the glade, we might need to do work on this, or if we finish on Tuesday, push on down the line. Maybe our focus needs to be on the path widening between now and the end of March. We can plan what we want to do with the glades and what we want the greenway to look like, over the summer.

See you on Tuesday!

Paul