Today we had 5 volunteers and a bio-diversity officer from Glasgow City Council. I felt this was very encouraging considering the weather was rather damp in the morning. We started with some basic grass raking at Woodside meadow. A new meadow is being constructed on the hill so that it can be used for more wildflower planting – thus gradually greater varieties of butterflies and bees. We were just raking together the biggest clumps of grass and relocating it to somewhere hidden – the hill was to be made presentable for the community. At around 11 we had one team doing some wildflower planting, while the rest continued the small amount of raking left. Its always a good idea to change up the duties just in case people lose morale. We finished around half 11 and then moved on to the next site Craigend Wood.
As you can see from the image below everyone usually has a lot of fun tree felling.
We arrived at Craigend wood around 10 to 12 and decided to have an early lunch to regather ourselves and dry off slightly. Once we started we were targeting younger trees and those that were dying, It can be fun but also a lot of diligence is needed – the image below shows this.
We continued tree felling until 3 o’clock with little hassle and everyone seemed a lot more pleased with their work than earlier on which is not to say we didn’t do work raking but the weather has a way of sapping peoples enthusiasm. There were some great tree species diversity, the most obvious being the Rowan tree in the image below.
There was also some curious amphibians in the woods as photographed by moi below.
Once we had collected all the trees we layed them flat in the trenches between the rows of trees or in habitat piles. We then headed off to drop the volunteers off at the meeting point – everyone seemed to have a good time and that is very important to me and the volunteers.