Land Manager's Diary: Read it here>

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A couple of weeks ago we mentioned the wonderful haws or hawthorn berries. They are not the only fruits and berries around - Dam Mire Wood is full of beautiful autumn leaves and fruits. The alder trees are drooping with seed, the rose hips red, rich and ripe.

Pictured: Rosehips at Dam Mire Wood

No one sent in any hawthorn recipes, and doubtful anyone could beat our family recipe for rosehip wine. Great autumn days out picking the fruits as kids and then mincing them for wine, but the cold hands were not so popular…remedy hot chocolate with a slug of rum…

Pictured: Alder fruits at Dam Mire Wood

Anyway, this week saw the volunteers at Dam Mire Wood at Threlkeld. The sun shone the day before as we did some set up tasks, but alas it was a wet, cold and very muddy day. A new task for us…planting wetland plants. It is more common to plug plant hay meadow species as we did at High Borrowdale. Plug planting is an easy way of adding plants and diversity to a habitat, be it your garden lawn or other bits of your garden. Putting in wetland plants was a recommendation of the ecological survey we had done last year.

Pictured: Volunteer Roger planting at Dam Mire Wood

The aim is to add diversity to the habitat, provide new sources of food for pollinators and make the habitat more resilient. We put in 300 plants which were are mix of Ragged robin, Sneezewort, Meadowsweet, Great burnet, Water avens, Valerian and Wild angelica. Fingers crossed as the success often depends on the winter and spring weather that we will face. 

Pictured: A wet coffee break 

Whilst there we also cracked on with other tasks such as sweeping all the leaves and muck off the bridge, a bit of path drainage work, trimming one of the new hedges to allow the growth to thicken out and beginning the task of taking the spiral tree guards off some of the bigger trees.

Pictured: Hedging to be tamed at Dam Mire Wood

It was great to be joined by some new volunteers, Mike all the way from Lancashire, and Sue and Corinne more locally. Join us at Dam Mire Wood on our next visit  and help us create a willow den with local school children - Monday 29th January 2024. Follow the link to book a place.

Book a place to join us at Dam Mire in January / take a look at our full schedule of workparties for 2024>