An update from Sara Messenger of the Bradley Stoke in Bloom group.

Well, what a month! We have done some work in places other than the Manor Farm Roundabout. Not much, but some. We did some overtime and have given the community herb garden a replant. These are the large wooden planters outside Brook Way Activity Centre. Just for fun, we’ve added a few vegetables to one, for some colour. We have beetroot, chard and lettuce, and for the children, strawberries. For those with more sophisticated palates, you can choose anything from the spicy curry plants and wild garlic, to borage, fennel and rosemary. Or maybe parsley, basil, chives or thyme are more to your taste. Whichever you prefer you are welcome to come and snip off any that you fancy.

In another bit of overtime, we have managed to repair the bench at The Common East and on one sunny Sunday morning it was also repainted. Apart from the non-stop birdsong, it was amazingly quiet, until I found a dog to fuss and someone to talk to that is. Our new decoy ducks are still nameless, but Wheatfield School is intending to rectify that soon and will be running a competition to choose their new names, which we’re looking forward to. We might even be able to come up with a prize for the lucky winner. Usually in the spring we remove the decoy ducks so as not to upset the drake, but as we’ve not had a breeding pair take up residence this year, we have left them where they are. This pond no longer has any fish, but it does have some very large tadpoles. I suspect they are thriving as, apart from a dragon fly larvae or two, they have no predators here.

We have, in agreement with SGC, been keeping an eye on their Brook Way wild flower strips, and gave our new recruit Kelly the task of pulling out the oilseed rape plants. This may not have been a good idea, as I think some of them were almost as tall as she is! We also discovered that the thistles I often admired were in fact not thistles but something else (not that I know what – it took me long enough to remember ‘brown side down, green side up’!). But I did remember the three birthdays we have this month in the group, Pepi, Jenny and Stevie. They couldn’t all make it this month so we had plenty of cake to work off in the afternoon.#

More: And then there was Manor Farm Roundabout »

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