Savernake Volunteers: meet next on 7 October – first Wednesday monthly 10am at Eight Walks.

The group will be starting a new project at Crockmere Pond having completed work on Birch Pond.Anyone interested in joining the volunteers should contact Mark Maynard the ‘Community Ranger’ who leads the group on 07831 354 204.

We’ve finished at the pond and the contractor has been called in to start digging it out over the winter. Thanks everybody for making such a fantastic job of it – you’ve made it possible for us to minimise the amount of contractor time spent on this – which means that we can get more pond work done this year than we would have been able to.

Our next mission will be clearing regenerated conifer near Crockmere pond. The idea is that, long term, we’ll be returning some of the areas with conifer plantation on them back to broadleaf. When those conifers are considered to be mature enough, we’ll do the usual thing of selling them and having them felled. The area will then be planted up with some kind of broadleaf cover (no detail on the exact composition just yet). The problem we have is that the conifers have been reproducing in the interim and we have a number of small conifers that are of no commercial value. The big felling companies won’t take them, but they’ll be unwelcome competition to the broadleaves that we end up planting amongst them.

Our job then, is to work through these blocks and fell any small conifers that we encounter to give the broadleaves a better chance in the future.