Abingdon Green Gym Blog

  This Saturday we returned to Southern Town Park in Abingdon for some litter picking, bramble cutting, and (most excitingly) maintenance of our wildflower patch. It was a busy day on Lambrick Way (our meeting place for the day's session) as there were seemingly hundreds of football games going on at once on the playing fields, but it was lovely to see so many people enjoying the outside and being active. We had a quick briefing from our commander-in-chief, Kevin, before heading down around the playing fields to find a suitable place to set up camp and begin the day's activities.  Most of the team headed off to the wildflower patch to get going with nettle pulling and redistributing the now dry seedpods from the wildflowers. Whilst nettles do indeed provide a vital habitat for many creatures, there are plenty of them in this area, so we try to make sure that our variety of pollinators are not crowded out. Whilst the flowers were all over for this year, there were plenty o...

It was a day of two seasons at Cothill Fen this Saturday, with thick fog greeting our volunteers before it all burned off to a rather warm and sunny morning. Cothill Fen is popular among the volunteers and we were glad to be back, with many commenting on how much the fen has changed since volunteers from Natural England and Green Gym had started working on it.  After a quick health and safety briefing from Eleanor D, the day's Session Leader, we followed Steph from Natural England down to our working site, where she explained to us today's tasks.  The volunteers then split in to two groups: those raking and distributing the the reeds (which had already been cut by Natural England volunteers - team work!) along two causeways which needed some bolstering, and those helping to build 'fish-scale bunds' (fish-scale here referring to their shape, not their material). These bunds, Steph explained to us, help the fen in two ways. Firstly, they create new marginal habitats that ...

A new site for this session! We were at Thrupp Green - basically an area of private land comprising a meadow beside a lake in the Thrupp/Radley Lakes area. The session was a joint meeting with members of the Green Gym, the Abingdon Naturalists' Society Green Team, Earth Trust and the Friends of Radley Lakes.  We met at the far end of Barton Lane - essentially the same location as our Barton Fields work parties, but in this instance we would be gathering our tools and heading out in the opposite direction. Along the old railway line/Sustrans track out of town. We met with members of the other groups at 9:30am, including David Guyoncourt from the Green Team who directed the session. Here we picked up the tools - mostly rakes and scythes and walked the 15-20 minutes along to the site. A small sub-team peeled off before we arrived at the entrance gate in order to remove a fallen willow across a path using saws and loppers. The rest of us soldiered on, gaining access to site close to th...