Balsam Pulling Season Over on Aug 28th

Well, as of Tuesday 28th of August, the Himalayan balsam pulling season will be over. We have pulled huge areas this year with good success. Some areas were virtually clear of balsam, while others which we thought were clear have come back. These areas are generally by the storm drains. In early August we decided to try and tackle the balsam upstream from the reserve and it will be interesting to see if this has had a positive knock on effect for next year. Sadly, there are still huge areas dominated by balsam, and we will desperately seek new volunteers to help us out next year. A rough map of our work for this year is shown below. Hopefully, we'll be able to bring in School's to help next year, which has been such a successful method over in Cardiff. Thank you to everyone who has helped pull it up especially, Maria, Tricia, Beau, Amy, Steve, Brenda, Anthony, Mr. & Mrs. Barnes, Pat and Mum and to those who we do not know about, who leave small piles of balsam here and there.

 

View Balsam mapping in a larger map

 

 

Some pics from this season's pullings.

Pulling by hand

 

New Information Board

Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Email are all very useful tools, but encouraging local people to take action to actively conserve the local nature reserve that they use and appreciate may be beyond their usefulness. As such we applied for and received funding from Keep Wales Tidy early in 2012 to part fund a notice board which people would walk by and see. The information panel has been really successful since it was put up by Jon, the Ranger, his vols and some of the Friends of Henllys LNR. This is a oak information board, so we thought in keeping with that, we would purchase a wooden notice board. About half the board was funded by TCBC and we put up this board on the reserve with help from Brian, TCBC's the Rights of Way Ranger as Jon was away on Olympics duty with the TA.

Brian and vol getting the legs drilled in place.

Brian had a few vols with him who helped dig the holes for the legs, collect the water for the postcrete and help make sure the board was looking great in its new site.

Finally, I printed off a few information sheets and added a wipe marker board to add information to the board for events etc.

Great news is that we attracted the attention of 2 new volunteers already and during a recent Himalayan balsam pulling session, 2 teenage girls asked us what we were doing and said "Oh, that's that stuff that takes over isn't it, I read about it on the noticeboard". So, it looks like it is very much worth it.