Last Saturday’s volunteer session was a thin on volunteer numbers at the start of the morning (World Cup Football with England winning, as well as Wimbledon), but more people arrived at the morning went on.

The last 2 or 3 weeks has seen really warm, sunny days, with the grass in The Glade area now in full seed. In the August volunteer session, it’s expected that the scythe will be used. There’s a nice photo of volunteer Frank Smith with his socks covered in seeds after weeding in The Glade area!

Our 4th Woodland Volunteer morning this year got off to a bit of a soggy start, but somehow the wet weather brought out around 16 volunteers, most of whom stayed all the time. Although it feels still cool, and with the recent poor Easter Bank Holiday weekends weather in everybody’s minds, it was nice to see that trees were slowly starting to come in to leaf.

We had our third 2018 volunteer day today – the first opportunity after the snow. Main activities were working on the new trench at the bottom of the mound, to develop a more varied habitat in that part of the wood, planting some native yews and building and putting up some new nesting boxes. Here are some photos of that, just to prove that it is not only a bunch of old folk doing this. Also a little video to show that our bees have woken up.

Thanks to all the volunteers for their hard work and, as always, to Frank for tea, coffee and biscuits.

Our second volunteer session of the year was very well attended with committee members, regular volunteers and new volunteers. This morning’s event started earlier than usual as the group undertook, under the leadership of local expert naturalist Joe Beale, an early morning bird survey. Full results will soon be available on the website, but the list included gold finches, robins and a sparrow hawk made their names to the list.

The first volunteer session of 2018 took place last Saturday morning. Despite the temperature of just 4 degrees, several committee members and volunteers arrived. Today’s theme was to assess potential projects for later in the year, taking advantage of the dry weather and trees that have lost leaves to consider new places for new trees to be situated, as well as thoughts on new areas that can be planted up.

Although winter has only just started, already in places there were signs of Spring flowering plants already starting to appear, including the bluebells and primroses we’ve previously planted. We also found a foxglove which looks like it has arrived without being planted, a good sign of the potential seed-bank in the “mini Glade” area.