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