A Variety of Tasks

Tuesday, September 13th 2016

Today at Foxglove it was incredibly hot. However, our volunteers set to work as usual, once again on the heath, continuing the seemingly never ending task of pulling up encroaching tree saplings.

Where possible this is done with tree poppers, which lever small trees out of the ground. The problem we have is that in the past we have often pruned these rather than pulling them out at the roots so we are left with a giant lump of root and stems that is very difficult to remove. Many of these have to be dug out by hand to prevent them growing back again next year.

Whilst working out in the mini heatwave we found some nice creatures including this large Toad.

And this Pink-Barred Sallow Moth.

Ken and Eddie spent the morning strimming. Today they had a bit of variety- instead of the usual strimming of edges of pathways they strimmed the garden, then moved on to strimming the orchards.

The Orchards are like hay meadows and have not yet been cut at all this year to allow the orchids and other flowers to seed. The next job will be to rake up the hay before it has a chance to rot down, keeping the soil fairly nutrient poor to allow the flowers to grow in preference to the grasses. After lunch we all had a break from physical work and took a look into the past with Tony, who did a talk and slide show of the reserve from its early days.

It was incredible to see how the reserve has developed over time from its small beginnings to the reserve and field centre we are lucky enough to have today. Thanks very much to Tony for his presentation, and to the volunteers for all their help.

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