A team of 6 spent two hours yesterday until the heat drove us home, working on the hedge beside the pavement and cutting the earth bank back as far as possible so it is now about 1.8 metres wide for a stretch of about 15 metres from the entrance gate towards Wells. The overhanging vegetation has been trimmed back the whole way along to Mill Lane, but that stretch still needs the hard work of mattocks, spades and shovels to cut the earth bank back.
The rubbish has been cleared from the site, with just this left to go. Scrap metal has been collected, anything of value has found new homes and the buildings are now cleared. This was made possible by a huge effort to clear the undergrowth so that the buildings could be accessed and then painstakingly sorting through what was inside to make sure that things are disposed of correctly.
Your next opportunity to come and join in will be Sunday fortnight 31st July. Usually we start at 10 but if this heatwave continues, some people will want to start earlier while it’s still cool. Watch this space.
Also : on Thursday evening at 7pm in the Meeting Room behind the Memorial Hall we have a regular committee-plus-anyone-else-who-is-interested meetings. Very informal, all welcome. We will be discussing, amongst other things, how much grant money we still have and what to spend it on (it’s sort of flexibly ring-fenced for particular projects – we can’t have a party or go on a cruise with it!) and when to hold some open sessions so people can come and pick fruit.
The Jostaberries have now all been picked and frozen, and will be made into jam for sale to raise funds for the community later. The black birds also enjoyed them hugely!!
The apples and pears are a long way off ripe still, and most of the apples are cider-makers anyway so won’t be nice raw.
The land belongs to the community, so the fruit does too. Residents are more than welcome to pick what’s ready, enough for their own household’s needs, but taking the lot and selling it for commercial gain, returning nothing to the community which has worked so hard to make the place nice and to look after the trees, is not in the right spirit of things at all.
We’ll tell you when the fruit is ripe and arrange some open times so people can come and pick. To be discussed at Thursday’s meeting.
Somebody has been seen dumping rubbish in the river – again absolutely not OK behaviour. Any suspicious behaviour should be reported to the police.
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