“A nipping and eager air” first thing this morning! Or so it felt after the record-setting, T-shirts-laid-up-for-winter-unearthing warmth of Hallowe’en.
The only
climatic problem we had experienced ahead of today’s session was bad weather in
cyber-space. Almost every time I sent an
email to an AOL address, mailer-daemon would come back to me complaining “Mail
server for ‘aol.com’ unreachable for too long”.
But not always. Sometimes a
‘Failure Notice’ would arrive after a reply which told me my original email had
arrived safely at the first time of asking.
The only
weather-related problem experienced during the session was that a few impudent
drops of rain began to fall before session end.
On the re-start, rain started to fall heavily just as we were getting
back in our cars to go home.
In the
meanwhile, we had sight of the first new hat of the season:
 |
| Headgear inspired by the French onion-trade |
The
all-important tea-break (this week featuring toffee cake, lemon-drizzle cake, and pumpkin
sweets) took place around the first fire of the season:
We do, of course,
also do a fair amount of working out.
Hence one of our members remarking that she had lost half a stone since
starting Green Gym. (Well done!)
The task
before tea, alas, did not prove a popular one.
“Preparing ground for Cornfield Annuals”, we had been told. To which the response from any experienced
Green-Gymmer is, “How exactly are we to prepare the ground?” Any relief that we were only being asked to “rake
over to produce a fine tilth” after the soil had been dug over by a rotavator, was
soon dispelled by the discovery that many of the grass roots were still
attached to some remarkably clingy soil.
Moreover, that grassroots which had been detached by the power digger,
promptly re-attached themselves to the rake-heads.
There
followed a hunt for every fork, garden-, digging-, or pitch-, that we could lay
our hands on, to replace the rakes. Even
so, this proved to be one of those tasks where we could only say that we had
done our best.
All changed
after the break. An advance party had
already collected some of the brash from the cyclical cutting back of willow
re-growth, to get the bonfire going.
Green-Gymmers could then alternate tasks of collecting and wheel-barrowing
logs for wood-burning stove, collecting and carrying brash for the bonfire, and
reducing said brash to lengths short enough for immediate consignment to the
flames.
There was
not time to move all the logs out of the fen* area, so some were left by the
side of one of the walkways. If the
Green-Gymmer below looks as if he is concentrating very hard, like a sportsman …
that’s
because he is a sportsman, and was lining up a shot:
*Until I
began Green Gym, I had not fully appreciated that there are many different
types of wetland to be conserved – and that therefore the many different words
used in English for wetland have quite specific meanings. A ‘fen’ is a sub-category of ‘mire’, which in
turn should be distinguished from the category ‘marsh’:
Marsh inundated with surface water; mineral soils (no peat)Mire permanently waterlogged; peat-based
Mire-fen
- groundwater or spring-fed, so …
- nutrient-rich and neutral-alkaline (typically pH 6.5-9)
- sedge and grass dominated vegetation
- peat laid down slowly
Mire-bog
- rainfall-fed, so …
- nutrient-poor and acidic (typically pH c 4)
- acidophilic vegetation
- peat laid down quickly (1-2 mm pa)
The markers
for a fen:
- Peat ½ m thick
- Base-rich
At Withymead
the peat is just thick enough to qualify as ‘fen’ (measured at sample points, July
2014). At the very bottom – 3.6 m down –
is the gravel of Thames river bed. Also lots
of shells! During the summer those of us
lucky enough to be there when the hydrologist took his core samples, saw finds which
included an ammonite which could easily be 10,000 years old.
10,000 years
later, on the present surface of the Earth, we were just glad to get the task
to a good finishing point before the serious rain set in.
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