Really chilled out day on the greenway today. Mike showed us how to lay a hedge and it is starting to look really good. There is still loads to do to create a boundary but we made good progress. The clearing is way down towards the Potford’s Dam end and is adjacent to farmland, so will not affect the noise from the relief road. It is also in a cutting so there is a natural bank between the road and the houses close to the greenway.

Hedge laying. The next Hawthorn will lay on top of this one to create a living hedge.

This is a good contrast to what we did last year, which was to create a dead-hedge using the brash from cut down trees. Hopefully the dead-hedge will become ‘alive’ as climbing plants grow over it, but it will never look as good as what we did today.

Dead-hedge on the other side of the clearing.

Every tree that we cut down last season is now sprouting loads of shoots from the stump so we need to brush cut the clearings and find a way of killing the tree stumps that we don’t want to grow again. We need to find a way that is good for the greenway and one way would be to drill holes into the stumps and fill them with a high nitrogen fertilizer. If we keep the stumps moist, the nitrogen will feed fungi, which will naturally decompose the stump. This would be a safe way to tackle this issue. If anyone has any other ideas please shout out, but I would not feel comfortable putting some sort of toxic substance down that might harm a child or dog if they somehow got it into their mouths.

We felled all these trees and then had to chop them into bits to get them onto the bonfire.

We decided today that we need to gently widen the paths between the clearings and then maximise the clearings to create fantastic nature habitats. This means sunlight galore!!! We really needed to trim back the cleared areas over the summer because a lot of what we cleared last year is now overgrown again.

Next workdays:

Tuesday 27th September – 12:30pm to 2:30pm – brush-cut the clearing that we were working in today.

Sunday 9th October – 1pm to 3pm – widen the path between the clearing under the bridge and the clearing further down towards Potford’s Dam.

Wednesday 19th October – 2pm to 4pm – push path back from clearing under the bridge upwards towards the entrance.

Sunday 23rd October – 11:30am to 1:30pm – carry on with gently widening the path northbound.

Thanks to all who turned out today, it was a good day and we dodged the rain.

Looking forwards to the next few workdays in October and after we have finished the above, we need to tackle the flooding. I don’t quite know what or why the brook is flooding but it will be interesting for the engineers amongst us to try and solve this.

Until the next one!

Paul

PS: If anyone has a chainsaw please feel free to chop down the high tree stumps that are left from today.