Tree planting

We have been making what might seem to our followers like a great fuss about the planting of just a very few disease resistant elm trees. Here are parts of a post from March 2020, which explain what disease our precious saplings are resistant to, and why we are so eager to get them established in the hedge between Cornfield and Sleepers.

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Disease resistant elms

Progress report

by Ian Bushell

On April 10th we checked the fifteen Dutch Elm Disease Resistant trees, donated by Peter Shallcross and Frank Crosier, that we had planted in April 2021.

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Puddle Corner

by Clive Knight

Phil, Frank, Peter White and I have started to clear the grass that has overgrown the edges of the path that cuts out the flooded bit by Puddle Corner. We were surprised to see how far the grass has encroached onto the path. We estimated that clearing both sides has opened up the path by around 80-90cm. We haven’t reached half way but hope to finish next week.

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Woodland camp

There is always a gang of children, sometimes junior schoolers, sometimes older, playing somewhere in Village Green woods. The personnel changes as one by one gang members lose interest in sitting round a damp campfire, drinking mix-up or smoking what somebody sold them as top quality weed. But new arrivals come to fill the empty places and the gang continues.

What have they been up to?

What a difference a day makes!

After sending yesterday’s pictures of the wetland scrapes in Lambrok Meadow, our in-house photographer Simon Knight went back to the reserve to find all its water features, scrapes, ponds, ditches and streams, full to overflowing. Go carefully out there.

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SCP-LNR

SOUTHWICK COUNTRY PARK LOCAL NATURE RESERVE

PROJECTS PROGRAMME SUMMARY UPDATE – FOR 2022

Background.
The following programme of actions was taken as an outcome of the review of the park on 27th January 2013 by the Wiltshire Countryside Team and Friends of Southwick Country Park (FoSCP). It is intended that this is a living document: a record of previous projects and tasks conducted and an update of works carried out during 2022, a review of the reserve in general, and suggestions for possible future progress.

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Floodwater

The Lambrok is full to overflowing – nice to see after all those weeks of drought but go carefully.

All images taken in the reserve 20.12.2022 by Clive Knight

SET-ASIDE

Some years ago, an area at the top of Kestrel Field was set aside from the rest of the field and its agricultural calendar. The reserve would be unmanageable without the help of our tenant farmer, but we also recognise that the twice yearly grass-cut does damage the habitat of some of our wildlife species.

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Tree felling

by Ian Bushell

Our Tree Officer, Rich Murphy, has been running chainsaw monitoring sessions with Clive, Phil and myself to check our competence to fell trees in the reserve. The reserve belongs to the county and they are the people who pay to insure us.

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SWCK54

There are two public footpaths that cross the reserve: SWCK53 and SWCK54.

Alan and Sarah, long-term Friends of Southwick Country Park, have been clearing SWCK54 where it exits the reserve through a kissing gate on the north west side of Sleepers and heads to Wingfield. Hard work maintaining a public right of way among the overgrown brambles and nettles – thank you.

Bag it and bin it

To make it easier for you to access the reserve’s litter bins, we have laid flagstones through the muddy approaches that inevitably grow around the bins once the wet winter weather has set in.

Dog faeces on the reserve’s paths are unpleasant and unsightly; in the fields they are a source of infection for the animals that will eat next summer’s hay; everywhere and anywhere, they are a danger to the health of our visitors, their children and their pets. Bag it and bin it, please.

Thank you

NEW SIGNS!

Our Local Nature Reserve status is being celebrated with new signs.

Pictures by Ian Bushell

Backwater

Scrapes 2 and 3 of Wiltshire Wildlife Trust’s ABBA project will be backwaters lying alongside Lambrok Stream. A backwater is essentially a shallow pond connected to a waterway, providing still-water habitat away from the flow and turbulence of the main stream.

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