Snow good doing a tidy up

Well January so far has been a combination of cabin fever and postponed events and meetings. However, it has allowed a good opportunity to do a lot of paper work. This includes writing up some of the nice projects that we have been involved with. From the last few months of updates, quite a lot of effort has gone into our Wild Weekend projects which have a had a surprising amount of spin offs considering it is knocking a few bits of wood together. For instance the event between Glan yr Afon Primary School and Dave one of our Litter Champions in Llanrumney has brought the two together fantastically. The kids are now much more aware of the difficulties in trying to care for the environment with so very few people and are keen to lend Dave a hand to Keep Llanrumney Tidy. Moreover, the kids in more deprived parts of Cardiff often have poorer basic skills in language and communication. For this project, we sat down with the kids and wrote up a press release for the project. As all the kids were involved from the researching through to building and camouflage painting the boxes, they were all really engaged in the project and wanted to write stories, quotes etc. As a result of this hard work, the article was published in last week’s SW Echo and I met some of the kids and they were over the moon. So, we’ve managed to achieve a great deal all for £100 worth of Homebase vouchers. We’ve also just put together the parts from the Wild Weekend projects with Glan yr Afon and St. Bernadette’s Primary school to make a display in Homebase, Newport Road. Homebase with WG and CCW donated money towards the Wild Weekend Project, so it is nice to show Homebase and their visitors what we have done with these vouchers.

Dave, our star litter champion in Llanrumney is on the left here with Community Parks Ranger Kevin next to him. Well done to Dave for making all the boxes for this project.

Kids from St. Bernadettes getting Wild, SW Echo

 

Kids from Glan yr Afon Primary show of their camouflaged dormouse boxes, SW Echo

 

It cannot be understated, the positive effects that these stories getting into the SW Echo has on this kids. The funny thing about the last article is that the kids wrote the press release and I was the one mentioned in the paper. Funnier thing is that 2 classes took part in the project from yrs 5 & 6, one made dormouse boxes and the other made bat boxes. I did the press release with the bat box class while the dormouse box class had dance class. Nevermind, it is always the taking part that counts.

 

 We are just about to finish off the Wild Weekend project between our Lakeside Litter Champion Ian and Lakeside Primary School in Discovery Wood later this week. This again will hopefully help the woodlands to decrease the amount of rubbish as we’ve engaged so many of the children here too.

 Lakeside Primary School's make and paint the boxes

We already know that St. Bernadette’s have been responsible for a vast decrease in fly tipping in woodlands adjacent to their school by getting involved locally and putting out newsletters on it and we hope to bring more schools out to achieve similar things in their area.

 One are which has always been very difficult is the path at the north end of Cath Cobb Woods between Tesco and Oakfield Primary School and there has always been loads of rubbish dumped there. CFMEP came back in our first event of the year and cleared 23 bags of litter with about half on the Cath Cobbs side hopefully helping the Friends Group a little. We also cut back a little bit of brambles with permission from Parks Services and aim to get back there in February to do a little more cutting back (Parks also took away all the collected rubbish).

One small corner of our works, loads of litter was in the brambles

Most of the CFMEP team with the haul

 

Working in a Winter Wetterland

December was very similar to November with a great deal of time and effort focussed into Wild Weekend Projects. Most of these were achieved from permissions granted from Parks Services to build on the hard work we have been doing over the last few years in some of Cardiff’s Green Spaces by constructing various habitat boxes including birds, bats or dormice. The Wild Weekend Grants came from WG, Homebase and CCW and the lucky grant winners received Homebase Vouchers.

Community Park Ranger putting a bat box up a tree from St. Bernadette's Primary School's efforts

We finished off the bat and bird boxes over in Ely with Ely Community Mums and Cardiff Trail Scrubs with help from Ely and Caerau C1st and Ely North Youth Centre. We just have to pick a date to put them up in situ in January.

We started two very similar projects over in Llanrumney and Lakeside, pairing up litter champions with Primary Schools; these were Glan yr Afon and Lakeside Primary Schools respectively. Both events were great fun and the litter champions really enjoyed it. Great stuff by Dave who made all the boxes himself from our designs and they looked pretty good too. The project in Lakeside was not a Wild Weekend project as it failed with its grant, but was a Tidy Towns-funded habitat project. The nice one about this project is that we again used Ian’s fence preservative which we rescued from a flytip over a fence along Wern Gethin Lane in St. Mellons from earlier this year.

Glan yr afon pupils with their camouflaged dormouse boxes

 

There was much worry this month over insurance of groups and we were kindly rescued for this year only by WG giving permission for Tidy Towns money to be used for this year only. From next year onwards, groups will seriously need to find ways of funding their insurance. For instance, my own group plan on having a supermarket bag packing session with our local primary school to raise money for the School and for the Nature Reserve.

Our Cardiff Friday Mornings Environmental Project (CFMEP) rolled along nicely in December with a visit to Llanrumney helping out our litter champion over there. On this trip we met a really nice new volunteer who is really keen to join in with our activities. Very, very slowly we are making progress against tough odds and difficult circumstances. The only way to make the changes is working with as many primary school kids as possible in this area. Anyway, the 10 of us cleared 37 bags of rubbish plus about 200kg of larger stuff out of the woods around Llanrumney Playcentre.

An early picture of the rubbish in Llanrumney

We are always excited about new opportunities and performing habitat and woodland works, so we gave a trial to a lovely project in Troedyrhiw, Merthyr where we made a set and finished off a partially completed set up steps down to the river. This is part of the Wild Fishing Wales project and even though it absolutely chucked it down, we really enjoyed it and will be returning again in January to help out again.

Oh it was so wet, well done you brave few

I also had a look at a 14 acre site in Blaenau Gwent which the Council have allowed our officer over there, Thom, to manage. Here we will set up a coppice block which will be part of a larger rotation managed by Thom. We will be felling trees, processing them and will use the brash to delineate the margins of our woodland block. Again we will be coming here in January and/or February.

All in all, a good year and an exciting few months ahead for us all.

Wild Weekends and Wild Weather all over November

November has been a bad month for the weather, but a great month for Wild Weekend Projects, with almost all of them not happening on the weekend and many more of them following in December too. We were lucky to get permissions from Parks Services to build on the hard work we have been doing over the last few years in some of Cardiff’s Green Spaces by constructing various habitat boxes including birds, bats or dormice. The Wild Weekend Grants came from WG, Homebase and CCW and the lucky grant winners received Homebase Vouchers. This meant several trips to Homebase with groups and especially on 10% or 15% off days. This followed by more days in the garage sawing up the planed spruce wood with a sliding mitre saw making sure all the kits were perfect. These would then be taken to the group or school and we’d build and paint them. The idea as always is to link up schools with groups or litter champions and build up real interest and ownership. Building these boxes and performing other habitat works on sites does exactly that. Hopefully, the camo painting will deter unwanted vandalism. Vandalism makes it more difficult for us to obtain permission to carry on performing such activities, may decrease motivation by the kids and hinder progress.

 St. Bernadettes. Putting the bird and bat boxes together.

St. Bernadettes. Nursery and Reception painting the boxes, with a little help from two artists from year 6

 

 

Cardiff Trail Scrubs, Ely & Caerau C1st and Ely Community Mothers get together to make Bird and Bat boxes for a Wild Weekend

We also helped Ely Baptist Church, Fairwater’s Waterhall Youth Centre and the St. Mellons Community Education Centre to plant some Wild Weekend spring bulbs. All these events were great fun with the kids and adults really enthusiastic about the work. These are always funny events as the end is always a little messier than the beginning and you have to keep your fingers crossed until Spring.

 

Ely Baptist Church plant bulbs for a Wild Weekend

 

 

Planting bulbs with the brilliant yet threatened St. Mellons Community Education Centre

 

 

Weeding and planting for a Wild Weekend at Fairwater's Waterhall Youth Centre

 

 

Waterhall Youth Centre Wild Weekend Bulb Planting

We are now up to 75 litter champions in Cardiff which will soon rise to 76 when our latest one signs up in Pentwyn. This was a result of us helping another litter champion to clear up an area on her patch. Like many litter champions, amounts of rubbish can go up and down and CFMEP (Cardiff Friday Mornings Environmental Project) are often on hand to lend Litter Champions a little extra help to bring the rubbish back down to manageable amounts. Behind Glyn Rhosyn, Pentwyn, we removed 17 bags of rubbish plus some loose items and it has really helped Claire out:

"Thanks so much for the help, it was good fun and lovely to meet the other people. My patch looks lovely now and it will be so much easier to keep the litter down now that the area has been given a good clean. I couldn't have done it without the help of the CFMEP people. They do such good work."

Pictures can be viewed here http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCUnUGr

So, if you have a patch that needs a little help, please get in touch.

Back in August, we cleared halfway along a green lane up from Crystal Glen with a local resident. Then we removed 26 bags plus about 300kg of loose items as well as a great deal of Himalayan balsam. Well, we returned here as promised but from the top end next to Llanishen Rugby Club’s building and worked our way down towards this halfway point. Over the two Fridays in November, we collected 54 bags of rubbish and 400 kg of loose items.

 

 

This is very reminiscent of our work in the olden days of Chapelwood and opposite St. Bernadettes school and instead of just tidying them up we need to get local action and support. Pictures can be viewed here:

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCLNHVp and http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCWyzPD

 

Finally, it looks like we have another group who are interested in taking time out to try to clean up and area on a monthly basis with the aim to decrease the amount of litter dropped in the first place. They will work with local primary schools who have already performed tidy ups there and interact with the fishing community to help keen the area around Pentwyn Lake Clean. They hope to start early in the new year, so if you are interested in joining in there, give me a shout via chris.partridge@keepwalestidy.org

October hibernations and colonisations

As I mentioned last time, September is the busiest month of the year and I put in nearly 2 months worth of work in September, so I had the first 2 weeks of October off on flexi. This gave me a chance to have a look at projects in other parts of the country with new eyes. One of these was in my home town of Wallsend where I spoke to a local user of a Country Park, developed on an old Coal Mine from 1987. The litter and dog fouling there is a big problem and I talked to him about Keep Wales Tidy and the litter champion scheme that we have here and he said he wished that it also covered the north-east of England. Secondly, after telling my Dad about some of the things we do in Cardiff linking litter champions with Primary Schools, my Dad got in touch with the nearest primary school to him and now he volunteers there using his excellent gardening skills and the kids, the teacher and my Dad are loving it. Far too often teachers and assistants are given tasks that they know little about and are expected to just run with it (It is not just schools that this happens in that’s for sure). Well, by joining up with local expertise the teacher can quickly gain skills, knowledge and the confidence to better perform these activities. This ramble leads nicely into a lovely project in Bute Park that we were asked to do. The dock feeder, which we have pulled balsam, dug out invasive maples and cleared rubbish from, has several patches of bank which is eroding into a lottery funded footpath. We were asked to pilot a bank shoring up, or revetment, project to stop this erosion. I’d never done this before with recycled plastic revetment boards and posts, so 2 of my experienced colleagues, Thom from Blaenau Gwent and Paul from Merthyr came along to try out a feasibility 10 m section. I watched, took photos and helped in parts and it turned out to be hard work but do able.

I reckon it looks pretty good. For the only CFMEP event of the month, we finished it off by sawing the tops off the stakes, dressing the silt backfill with topsoil and added a little wildflower seed mix on top.

Carefull readers would know that we created a pond in Splott with Ysgol Glan Morfa, South Splott Residents’ Association, several church groups and physical help from John Lewis. The pond cost about £370 altogether. We only planted it in April of this year, but I led its first pond maintenance project later on this month. Armed with nets a much rake and sample trays, we killed 2 birds with one stone, we removed some overgrown pond weed and looked into the pond weed to see if it was starting to be colonised. The kids were split into 3 groups each time and were led by a local volunteer. I was extremely surprised at how well it was colonised and the best find of the day was a damselfly larva. These invertebrates can tolerate only good quality water, so that is brilliant news.

So, we built the pond with hardly any money, involved children and local residents to become stakeholders in the project from the very beginning and now we have seen that the pond is starting to be colonised beautifully already. Moreover, the children and adult volunteers know now how to do basic pond management. In a 2-3 years time we will also have to thin out the native plants that we put in there, but a great result all round. £300 of this money was from a grant from Cardiff Council’s Tidy Towns allocation and we’ve demonstrated how we can carefully spend this money with a fantastic cost/benefit ratio. Moreover, this pond can be used as a started pond for similar projects throughout Cardiff.

We now have 69 litter champions in Cardiff which is absolutely amazing (5 more waiting for kit). The latest spattering was in North Whitchurch. Over the last 2 years we have signed up quite a few in and around the Coryton roundabout which is a constant litter (including shopping trolleys) nuisance. During the coastal path clearance in Atlantic wharf earlier on in the year, 4 walking ladies joined in and said they were interested in doing some tidy ups somewhere and at some point. In September, they joined in with a clean up with Hollybush Residents’ Association, Coryton Primary, Barclays and Coryton Primary School (http://flic.kr/s/aHsjCbKY78). They got in touch this month and asked to set up a group based around the North Whitchurch area. They are called Cardiff Tidy Taffs, so keep an eye out for one of their monthly tidy ups and several of the local litter champions are keen to join in to get some help. If you want to be on their mailing list, get in touch.

On the subject of finding out things, many years ago when I did some survey work for Monmouthshire Council I came across the Monmouthshire Green Web site, which had lists of events, groups and other green/outdoor related activities and opportunities. Several years ago Adansdown C1st and Adamsdown Environmental Action Group created a Green Map for Adamsdown which listed things like schools, gardens, litter problem areas and other useful information. These approaches are altruistic in their benefit to all. There have been many times, where I have thought, I’m tired and I just want to know what is on in Torfaen or Monmouthshire that I can just join in with. Well if you type in “Events in xxxxxxx” Google you get loads of sites and it is really difficult to find information. In today’s difficult environment when everyone claims to be a community hub, a third sector body blah blah blah, it is so difficult to find the basic information that can help community groups grow. Cardiff Transition Group also knows this as they are all involved in voluntary action groups in Cardiff. As such, several months ago they set up a GreenMap for Cardiff and this lists groups, activities, contact details etc. The map link is here: http://cardifftransition.com/mapping and the events page here: http://cardifftransition.com/events-home The map is cluttered (you can filter what you are interested in) and the calendar in its early stages of development, but it truly serves this altruistic purpose. It is definitely worthwhile thinking about engaging in this mapping system even if it is only to check and see what might be going on in Cardiff on one of your free days.

I have been very busy all this week on Wild Weekend projects and in Ely Baptist Church we planted some bulbs for wildlife and they planted some wildflower seeds the next day without me after I showed them how to do it.

Finally, I have also been busy trying to work out how to make bat and hedgehog boxes from wood available from Homebase as part of the Wild Weekend scheme. This is because the wood is completely different from the wood that we would normally use for these projects. These will be appearing in and around Cardiff and Torfaen in the next few weeks.