TODAY

It was great to see lots of regular volunteers in the park this morning despite the forecast rain. In practice, the weather turned out to be not too bad for the 31 hardy souls who got on with some tremendous work right across the park - in some intermittent drizzle.

THE POPPY PATH

During the last few weeks, a lot of maintenance work has been carried out on the Poppy Path. As a result, we had accumulated a huge amount of green waste. Thanks to Deb from MCC, we had a very large skip delivered to the School Lane end of the Poppy Path over the weekend and by the end of the morning the team of Murray, Qazim, Allan and Ian had completely filled it.

Picture 1 shows Qazim and Murray standing in front of a half full skip. Picture 2 shows Allan half way back from the long walk from the volunteers shelter with his arms full of rakes. Picture 3 captures a lovely view of the newly re-painted Poppy Bridge and picture 4 captures the peaceful setting around the FoDP wreath of poppies nestling among the crosses containing personal messages in a bed of cyclamen. Thank you Qazim, Allan, Ian and Murray - this was an amazing piece of work.

FINALLY, THE END OF THE MARATHON EFFORT BY ALL VOLUNTEERS TO PLANT ALL THE WINTER PLANTS AND ALL THE SPRING BULBS.

With only 500 bluebell bulbs and 7 wheelbarrows full of polyanthus plants remaining to be planted at the start of the morning, a large team made up of Carl M, Jude, Tristan, Sandra, Julie D, Mike, Suborno, Kevin and Joyce soon made sure that, EVERYTHING was planted by the coffee break.

Picture 5 shows Tristan and Carl M working on clearing leaves from one of the rose beds and then planting the polyanthus. Picture 6 shows Jude working in the next flower bed, carefully planting more polyanthus. Thank you everyone - it is a relief to see all this planting completed before we break up next week for Christmas. Well done to everyone who has been involved in the planting during the last 6 weeks!.

THE EARLY BIRDS THIS MORNING

Both Pauline and Denise made early morning appearances before the arrival of most of our other volunteers this morning.

Picture 7 shows Denise very generously donating another beautiful deciduous azalia (called Persil) to the park. After careful consideration this azalia was later planted by Julie D, Ilma, Kevin and Lucy in the Flower Walk next to the new philadelphus donated by Julie. Picture 8 shows Julie D standing in the flower bed between both plants. Thank you all, but especially Julie and Denise for your generosity.

EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES

I know grammatically commas can save lives, but today it was more of a CLEAR, PATHS AND LEAVES activity which made a phenomenal improvement right across the park.

Picture 9 shows the superb result of Adrian using the leaf blower along the path from the Wilmslow Road entrance. Picture 10 shows Steve, Rob and Carl N tidying up the edging along the Sandhurst Road to Gillbrook Road path and picture 11 shows Rob (again) with Adrian, with the leaf blower, and Richard and Greg on the other side of the path. The park paths are now incredibly safe, and clean and they make a huge difference to how the park looks cared for. Thank you also to Brenda for making the Gillbrook Road entrance equally as clean and sparkling and also to Leslie who really mastered the leaf grabbers. Thank you all!

ALSO TODAY

• Especial thanks to David for faultlessly managing the tea and coffee orders at 11am. Thank you David!

• Thanks also to Grace (see picture 12) for single-handedly adding a new supply of plastic bags to every rubbish bin in the park. Excellent work Grace!

• Today we also started some maintenance work on the smaller specimen trees on the main grassed area near the cafe. We are very short of tree guards at the moment so we took the temporary measure of robbing a couple from larger trees so that we could protect the smaller ones. Picture 13 shows 2 of our smaller trees with new guards - thanks to our heavy gang. Great work guys!

Finally, thank you once again for your phenomenal support, and please don't forget that next week is our last volunteering Monday before our unprecedented 3 week Christmas break. We return on Monday, 8th January 2024!

And, of course, next week, we will follow our established tradition of enjoying mulled wine and mince pies as we celebrate and look back on an amazing year!