We had another lovely summer's morning for working and a good number of workers to enjoy it with. Plenty to do again, we had reports of a large branch down across the main path, down towards Pleasurewood Hills. No chainsaw was available so we had to use more traditional means to cut it up, handsaws and elbow grease! The guys soon had it sorted, tidied up and the path re-opened. The bridge leading into the field down near PwH does often get blocked. There is a concrete pipe under the bridge to allow the water to flow but this blocks too easily. We had some extra pipes (old carpet roll inners!) which we fitted under the concrete pipe and we also dug out the ditch on both sides of the bridge to help the flow - we wait for rain to test it. We made a start on closing off the copse near the B&B area, next week we can start putting a fence around it. We strimmed around the pond, the secret garden and started on the wildflower meadow. We will continue strimming the wildflower meadow next week. Hopefully, this will get rid of the doc weeds but we will leave the orchids. We continued digging up doc weeds from the B&B area. We do not want to strim this yet as we need the flowers to seed first. We noticed last week that there was a film on top of the pond, this week we put woodchips on the pond then blew them to one side, with the leafblower, and fished them out with nets. This seemed to have worked. We continued tidying up the nursery, which is looking a lot better than 2 weeks ago. We also continued clearing growth from around young trees and trimming back holly obstructing paths.
With coffee today we had a lovely selection of cakes from Ivor for his birthday. Somehow I feel Ivor's wife Sheila deserves the credit.
We were all surprised and glad to see our photographer out today. Wally had not been well and had not made the last few weeks so we had a Get Well card, signed by the workers, ready to post to him. We were able to present him with the card in person.
David thanked Ivor (Sheila) for the cakes and then went on to list what work had been achieved today and what needed to continue next week. David went through the future events for this year and next.