No cake?

A Wallingford-Green-Gym session without cake would be a contradiction in terms, wouldn’t it?

Well, some of us tried it today.  Not because it’s Lent and a power-crazed ‘C’ had finally flipped and decreed that because she is abstaining from food with added ingredient sugar, so must everyone else.  No: one of our other members had been having an “interesting” time experimenting with healthy food, and offered to bring along some of the results.  (She did actually bring some conventional cake too.)

There was something else different about today’s session: it was being covered by a post-graduate research student, who was investigating “the positive affect [sic] of nature on well-being.”  (‘Affect’ is neither typo nor spelling mistake, as I first thought when I saw it.  Apparently it’s all to do with the specialist terminology of the field.  ‘Field’: no pun intended.)  So today, Green-Gymmers were invited to fill in questionnaires before and after the session, to give a snapshot of mood:

“How ‘confused’ am I?”

“How ‘unworthy’ do I feel?”

‘Domine, non sum dignus’?

Participation in the study was entirely voluntary.  No-one had to do it, but in fact most of the Green-Gymmers were only too pleased to help.  Our umbrella organization (TCV) had given the project the go-ahead because the researcher would be in a position to share the results with TCV and those Green Gyms taking part, and it would l be “useful to provide further evidence on the link between health, well-being, and Green Gyms.”   

The questions had been formulated using subjective well-being methods, ie they related to how people felt.  We hoped that consumption of uncharacteristic healthy snacks would not skew the survey results!

Meanwhile, there was also some nature to observe with delight.  Here one of the trees we planted this winter, already beginning to come through:

And this was one of the views I had, while on log-carrying duty:

Yes, there was some work to be done today.  This was the warden’s reaction to having to tell us that it was not quite the task we had been expecting:

I think one might guess that the feeling she was experiencing at that point might have been a touch of embarrassment?  The fact was that because the rotavator had broken down, there was some serious digging to be done before ground could be prepared for cornfield-flower sowing.

Before that, however, there was a small ceremony to perform.  Note what appears to be 

a doily perched on top of one of the fence-posts we had sunk (and in the foreground, Green-Gymmer tooled up with mattock, eager to start work):

The ‘doily’ had been pre-positioned, so that there could be an unveiling ceremony – to reveal what might just be the smallest commemorative plaque in history (but which is no less welcome):

At last, volunteers could set to, with spades for turf-stripping …

and mattocks for breaking up and turning over the earth:

While other volunteers transported cast-out roots and sods to the heap for re-use elsewhere on site:

At yet another point on site, beside the river, volunteers waited patiently (and tried to keep warm) while a tree was felled.  Does the tree-feller look as if he might be experiencing a certain feeling of triumph?

Whether he was feeling exultant as the result of taking down the tree safely, or because he had done so without it promptly floating off downstream, is another matter.

It was then a question of using the cable (which only needed adjusting occasionally) 

to drag the tree on to dry land, where it could be sawn into logs and brash for Green-Gymmers to carry away:

And so to the end of the session when, having ploughed by hand, Green-Gymmers could scatter the good seed on the land:

This meant the session over-ran slightly, but it made all the difference to how satisfying it felt for participants.

And another thing ...

You know you’re getting old when you discover you can’t use The Pitchforker’s Pride is a Fallacy for a blog title, because you’ve already done that once.

And if you think you have already read a blog once about clearing scrub on Linkey Down, that’s because you have.  Today was session #2: same task, same tools, same barbed-wire fence in our way:

Today was a good day to be out on the Chilterns scarp:

(Impossible to tell from the photograph that what had attracted our attention was a herd of fallow deer, on the far slope.) 

It felt cold, though, on account of the wind.  Note the insulated pitchfork:

Most of us kept layers of winter-warmers on throughout the session.  Some endeavoured, with varying degrees of success, to use the power of the wind to assist in lobbing cuttings over the fence. 

At tea-break, when the weather threatened briefly to turn nasty on us, some volunteers were glad of the shelter newly created by all the brash thrown (whether or not wind-assisted) over the fence-line:

As always – or so it seems – when we go to that site, the direction in which cuttings had to be transported on the slope was: UP.  This makes for an excellent cardio-vascular workout; also strengthening of glutes, quads, and hamstrings – and a good appetite, come tea-break!

In the second half of the session, as volunteers started to weary, a casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that we a. had a man down, b. didn’t care!

It was only on approaching closer that one could see that this was not a case of “him and work had a fallin’ out” (as they say in Wisconsin).  Also that the Green-Gymmer was very much still alive, but the stubborn treelet in his way would soon be food for the fire:

As for the creatures for whose benefit (as well as our own health) we were doing all this work, they made a brief appearance at the start of the session.  This was largely for the purpose of checking out that none of the site warden’s kit included extra rations for them:

Double-checking that there were no mineral supplements in any of the boxes was a process which had to be repeated several times.  Of all our customers, sheep are the most woolly-headed, literally and metaphorically: it is only in the movies that sheep are the quick-witted, resourceful heroes.

However, at least when we are doing things for sheep, no Green-Gymmer pipes up with “What are they good for?”  For everyone knows that sheep make for mutton pie and rogan josh – as well as providing wool, which can be turned into winter-warmers or works of art / cultural-political statements: