Another useful volunteer session on May 24 with Lesley, Paul, Paul and Malcolm. It involved extensive mowing of verges, removal of excess nettles and docks at the north end of the main path, and removing an illegal padlock fixing the Nelsons Lane gate open.

A 4-hour blitz with both mower and strimmer on the grass alongside Nelsons Lane on Saturday May 20th, between the Playground and Hobmoor Terrace. We left some substantial strips of wildflowers for habitat diversity and took grass off for composting elsewhere on the site.

Back to other routine tasks on Monday morning, May 15th, strimming carefully around daisies near the gate getting ready to treat this section of the fence there, and pricking out Ox-eye Daisy seedlings in the afternoon to produce plug plants to enhance the wild flower distribution on the meadow as part of our Co-op Community fund supported programme starting in the Autumn.

Using long plugs to hopefully improve drought tolerance after planting out the plugs.

Took another 25-feet branch down on May 12th. A bit tricky because of proximity of trees we want to maintain so had to come down in several sections using a pole saw.

If you look at picture below you can mentally reassemble the tall branch and will see why it was a job that took care and planning. A lot to cut up for disposal before taking down the next large branch!

CYC workers on May 6th took the final stump sections of the first 2 problem goat willows (with roots thought to possibly be damaging an adjacent house) down to ground level and treated them with herbicide. Job was made easier for them by all the careful preparation by Malcolm, Lesley, Paul , Alan and Tim over the previous week which had disposed ofthe upper 25 feet of the canopy. Meanwhile, on May 7th, Malcolm started removing some large lateral branches from the other major problem goat willow.

Look carefully and you can see where 2 of 3 major limbs were removed.

Good to get back to our more regular activities like strimming under the Nelsons Lane fence and mowing verges now the main part of a problem willow is disposed of. Lesley and Malcolm managed an hour of grass trimming on May 2nd.