Saturday morning’s volunteer session was very well attended, allowing lots of jobs to be tackled in anticipation of next month’s Autumn Open Day. As can be seen, it was a wonderful, sunny morning in the woodland.

The pond’s water level after the recent rain has risen, but committee member Miriam Hier can be seen clearing some of the vegetation that’s starting to cover the surface area. There’ll always be bramble and weed clearing, and volunteer Paula was playing an active role with the aid of the thick, leather gauntlets to pull up the weeds without getting hurt.

This morning’s volunteer session, not too surprising with Summer holidays in full swing, was very quiet on numbers, although we did welcome 2 new people who live in Seren Park Gardens for the first time.

The Glade’s grass was due for its annual cut. Andrew Slade and Kate Campbell did an excellent job in cutting the grass and removing weeds. The grass cuttings will form part of our newly proposed composting facility.

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.