Course tutor Dave Warburton showing the difference in length of inflorescence between timothy (Phleum pratense) and smaller cat’s-tail (Phleum bertolinii)
Thursday 25th September 2025 - With an early morning division of the volunteers three sites were covered today even though they were separated by quite some distances.
Starting the day with one squad at the Butterfly Bank on Mellows Park and another at Rose Hill Park East it was another case of gathering, loading and then removing areas of pre-cut arisings for the team.
Working swiftly, with about half an hour to spare before lunch the re-united team were already on their third site of Oaks Park. As a final tidying brushcut to the chalk scrapes and raking of the produced material got underway, at this sites Butterfly bank a duo of the team set bout de-constructing the surrounding protective fencing now the bank is fully established.
As the remaining posts were extracted with improvised ingenuity, coming out with not one breakage to be seen, the bank received a nearly full cut-buck (blame the brushcutter batteries!) with the vestiges of the arising being rolled across the immediate vicinity to use every last seed to increase distribution before being cleared into the trailer.
Tuesday 23rd September 2025 - A decided chill started the mornings activities for a slightly smaller team than usual, luckily the work soon heated everyone up and weather soon followed suit.
Starting the day off at Beddington Park where pre-cut grass around the stock pond area awaited collection and disposal, it wasn't too long before the team then made the short move to Carew Manor Wetlands for the same task on the main grassland here.
As some of the team got shifting the arisings the brushcutter was soon at work on the island making more of the same to rake, after a fallen Willow was trimmed up to allow crossing at the weir to get there (the before/after pics)!
Thursday 18th September 2025 - After Tuesdays turnout todays fair sized contingent of a team felt almost lonesome as they set about tasks at Wellfield North and Queen Marys Woodland.
Although the tasks for both sites was just a case of raking up the pre-cut grass a bit of variety was added on the undertakings at QMW, green haying was carried out with a portion of the cuttings in the Wood pasture area being spread to the last, botanically bereft corner of the compartment, the pond enclosure got a brushcut of its gone over haul, a fallen Hawthorne was cleared on the Eastern grassland and the remaining compartments around the circular ride were topped and left to dry for another day.
Tuesday 16th September 2025 - With Sun shining and a slight but welcome breeze permeating the air a battalion sized team set to work across three areas of Roundshaw Downs.
The usual Tuesday teams workload was sufficiently alleviated with the aid of a party of corporate volunteers from the London Borough of Sutton's communications team swapping the confines of an office for the great outdoors.
Working around the Southern Meadow, the Borough separating East bund and the Eastern-most Butterfly Bank the super-sized squad, working like a well oiled machine, set about clearing the areas of pre-cut and freshly cut grass, carried out a bit of Green Haying to botanically deficient areas and even harvested seed from the Butterfly Bank for future use in the course of their toils.
Thursday 11th September 2025 - Two sites were on todays schedule, Queen Mary's Park and Corrigan Rec but the weather made it two unique experiences.
Kicking off at Queen Marys Park the Sun was shining magnificently as the relatively small team of volunteers set about brushcutting the Butterfly Bank and snipping out encroaching Bramble from the surrounding vicinity. With the bounty of species on the bank raked for use, the tractor and harrow then went to work preparing a couple of meters around the feature to a suitable finish for the harvested species-rich green haying to take place, hopefully increasing the general distribution further.
Travelling onto Corrigan, the squad got a full five minutes into the job of cutting the double Butterfly Banks here and installing some marker posts around one before a slow moving dark grey cloud moved in bringing a heavy downpour with it!
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