A massive thanks to Robert, Keith and Kas for all their help in the garden today. Our little group did a fabulous job.
With everything that was going on at Westbury Arts Centre when we turned up, unfortunately I didn’t manage to get my usual “before” pictures, but you can take my word for it when I say that you couldn’t see the path through our forest garden before we got stuck in, so that transformation was mightily impressive!
It was great to do a bit of a tour of the grounds to begin with, where we bumped into our friends at the Centre for various chats about the fabulous wildlife and art on offer.
In addition to it being the final weekend of Bucks Art Weeks where we had lots of artwork to see and artists to meet, it was lovely to meet up with the resident Bee Group and hear about their activities for the day “marking” the drone bees, i.e. the ones that’s don’t sting.
I’m not sure who was more excited about the results of the MK Natural History Society‘s bioblitz (recording all the flora and fauna at this historic site from 4pm on Friday until 1pm Saturday), the people doing it or us! But it was amazing to hear accounts of the Common Whitethroat nesting in our plot and to see the stunning (Six-belted) Clearwing moth they’d discovered.
The currants are starting to ripen so we picked a few of them, but it was the raspberries that stole the show.
With the golden raspberries ready for eating already, we all (but especially the children) enjoyed these sweet little treats in the garden today. In fact, for some of us they definitely fuelled us through to the bring and share lunch.
There weren’t many of us, but we managed to achieve an enormous amount, cutting back the edges of the forest garden to make way for the path again.
Making use of the woodchip to get a good layer of mulch down over the path is not only a good way of showing the extent of the work we’ve done, not to mention looks good, but should really help to keep the weeds at bay for another fortnight before we’re back at it again.
