New Tricks for Old Tasks

By the Session Leader:

Natural England are never short of tasks for volunteers.  It was no surprise that there were three different tasks lined up for us. 

Some surprises on a Green-Gym morning there always are, but that was not on of them.  Having a range of tasks worked out well, as two of them were best done by teams of three.  Any more and we would have been getting in each other’s way.

What really did startle today were fresh twists to two of the tasks. 

The destructive task – to remove a rotten gate post – started easily enough.

It looked massive, but was so rotten it lifted out easily.

Not so easy was unbolting the gate from the rotten post:

The real stumbling block, however, was removing the rest of the post from the ground.  Not only was the base still sound, but gradually we realised that our initial suspicions were correct: the old post really had been concreted in place – not recommended practice.  [Not something we, WGG, have ever done, with either gate- or fence-posts. – Ed.]  After much strenuous work by at least three people in turn, we had barely made an impression.

Hats off to newcomer Joe, who worked at it hard as a badger – and still we’ve left some concrete to be removed, for Sonning Common GG to do on Thursday.  So the gate was temporarily put back in place:

Meanwhile new fencing posts were to be thumped into the ground, 4.5 metres apart, ready for stock netting.  This – the constructive task – was along the stretch where we had cleared vegetation in a previous session.  Fence-posts we have often put in, at many different sites.  The difference here was that these sparkly new steel posts. 

First time we had seen these clever posts, which were quite a lot easier to erect than wooden ones: no need to dig deep holes!  The technique was to make a small starter hole, insert the post, and drive it in with the two-person post thumper. 

The lowest strand of wire was already in place to align the posts.

The trickiest part was keeping the posts vertical as they were driven in.  Anyone peaking through the bushes [eg volunteers taking a spell from gatepost-stump bashing – Ed.] would have spotted three Green-Gymmers repeatedly checking their work against a spirit level:

This took time.  Nevertheless, just at the end of the session, all the posts were in.

The third team disappeared to cut back overhanging scrub in a nearby field,

where there were several remarkable things to be seen, including the remains of Giant Puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) …

and, well would you like to guess?

(Answer: the remains of a screen used to hide portaloos when public events were held there.)

Judging by the amount of brash they were dragging away, that team got through a lot:

They stopped when one of them got as far as a badger sett, apparently freshly occupied, though possibly only temporarily by a passing lone male:

At tea break the array of treats prompted some discussion of the symbolism of the display:

Some of it is very traditional for the day – it being the Principal Feast of Our Lady (yes, even in the Church of England calendar), which falls around the time of year when in the past many rural communities would be celebrating with great joy (possibly also relief) the first-fruits of harvest.  Mind you, the items had also selected themselves because they were among lines on offer or reduced for quick sale at the local supermarket the evening before!  It is authentic folk-culture to mark the day with fruit (oranges, layer of raspberry in the cake), flowers (daisies on top of the cake, lavender in the biscuits), the trad Marian colour blue (the icing really is sky-blue, it’s not a trick of the camera), and heart shapes (Mary’s love for her son).  The bee – well you can attribute your own symbolism to that: it stings, as well as bringing sweet things.

Paths gentle and clear

By ‘C’:

Waiting for one's fellow-volunteers to arrive, a Green-Gym leader really hopes they will not be thinking this during the course of the session:

Actually there were several moments this morning when I felt as behind events as a certain Minister for Magic; but the session rolled on nevertheless.  If there were times when I totted up the number of volunteers I could account for on site, and the answer came to 7 (when I knew perfectly well that we were an 8 at start of play), well the 8th person was located soon enough, safe and sound.

Our RV time was 10:00 as usual, but the place had been changed.  As my passenger remarked, as we arrived, it did feel like driving on to the set for an action film, probably some kind of thriller:

There was an explanation for this.  Our work-site was to be at Neptune Wood, on the Earth Trust estate, but car-parking this morning, was courtesy of the neighbours, the Sylva Wood Trust (another conservation charity, not a movie studio):

They were very kindly letting us use some of their space, while the public car-park for Neptune Wood – not before time – is being resurfaced, with a little help from Tesco:

From the Sylva HQ, our way led up a pretty stretch of field-path:

We have, I think, in the past done work on left hand side of that path, a little further up: something to do with being nice to the wildflowers – hay fever permitting.  On this occasion, the entrance to our work area was a gap in the hedge:

Neptune Wood is still quite young: planted to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.  All the same, there are a few areas in need of some love & attention.  The noticeboards for instance:

We, however, were there to give love and attention, aka ‘side up’, the public rights of way, which were being ‘nibbled away’ by encroaching vegetation:

There are two little bridges on site.  By the time I got to the other one, I found it had already been done – I could see where Green Gym had been:

“Showers”, heavy and slow-moving, seemed to the import of the amber warning which had been issued by the Met Office for later in the morning.  – Except that from the perspective of the person getting wet, ‘heavy, slow-moving showers’ = ‘rain’.  And there sure was quite a lot of that, even if not quite the deluge one had been led to expect.  Nature was soon looking bedraggled:

If you look closely at the skyscape in the background of that second picture, you can see how close we were to Didcot (remaining cooling towers and chimney for the power station), though it didn’t feel like it.

Green Gym carried on regardless, until the job was done – on the principle that there is no such thing as bad weather, just poor choice of clothing.  Let it rain!