Wallingford Green Gym: In the leafy month of June

It is, I suppose, summer? Long days; fresh fruit in the bowl – strawberries, cherries, plums; and extended spells of dry weather, certainly. Stiff north-easterly breezes, however, have meant that on many days it has hardly been T-shirt weather, no matter how much sunshine was served up:

Thinking back to last time the group was in Ewelme, also to last week, Green Gym seems lately to have been doing rather a lot of clearing trees which had fallen in unseasonably high winds. Wind speeds have not been very high, but in the summer months – for a deciduous tree – there is more foliage in the canopy for a gust of wind to get hold of.

The brisk east-northeasterly did finally calm down, and swung round to west-southwest, just in time for the weekend. Cue rain.

In good time for Tuesday (Green Gym), the wind spun back to ENE. Thankfully, gentler this time. Cue drier weather.

Now the meteorological environment has settled down to plain mild-and-dry. To match, there may have been a more normal summery task lined up for Green Gym today ... Over to the session leader to find out:

The forecast for the day was warm with sunny spells, but not clear blue skies. Well they were just about right:

The task was the usual clearing watercress out of channels, but this time from a channel next to houses and gardens. Apparently weedkiller from the gardens was believed to have been washed into the cress, and killed the fish. By clearing that channel it was hoped that any other chemicals would get washed away quickly.

When we looked at it, the view was daunting:

Even more so was the path along the right bank. It had been cleared by us four weeks ago, but was now a dense thicket of three foot high nettles. This did not daunt our Australian member who was obviously used to clearing jungles: