Friends of Adel Woods

FOAW’s return to active service seemed in jeopardy when Leeds was put on lockdown on Friday due to rapidly increasing Covid-19 infections. It looked as if today’s event would have to be postponed. However, there rules make an exception for voluntary activities and a message was received yesterday morning that we could go ahead.

We met at the Slabbering Baby entrance to the woods on Buckstone Road at 10 am and we had a brilliant turn out of six – in addition to Steve Joul. The weather was chilly, but it was a pleasant day.

We had three tasks this morning: litterpicking, clearing spaces for our new interpretation panels and general path clearing. Unusually, none of our volunteers opted for litterpicking and so we all set off to our first task: clearing a space for the interpretation panel on the path down to the Slabbering Baby. Of course, we took a couple of litterpickers and bags with us and collected rubbish on our way.

The interpretation panels are a final stage of the Meanwood Valley Project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund: see our blog post for 11 June 2020.

On the way down to the location of this panel we saw that the Alder trees and the nettles by the path had very many blue beetles on them. Steve was of the view that they were alder leaf beetles in view of their location. However, it is only possible to identify some beetles accurately under magnification.

Clearing the space for the interpretation panel was a bigger job than anticipated and entailed cutting back holly, removing a number of small trees to lighten the location up, and marking the site for the panel with non-toxic spray. Unfortunately, when Steve shook the spray can, the orange paint started to shoot out of a puncture in the side, giving Steve some very stylish and modern flashes to his trousers!

From there we made our way up to the moor to clear and mark the space for our interpretation panel there. This was a much easier task, merely requiring the removal of brambles, and marking the location with another can of spray paint which Steve had fortunately brought with him. As the gentlemen volunteers helped Steve with this, the lady volunteers set off to clear holly and brambles from one of the paths down from the moor to the Slabbering Baby.

The path in question was one FOAW cleared a few years ago but it had become very overgrown. We spent about 30 minutes cutting back brambles and removing saplings.

By the time we had completed this task it was 11.40 and Jude and Steph set off home. The remaining five set off up the Meanwood Valley Trail to Adel Crag, the site of the final interpretation panel. Fortunately, this required no more than agreeing the location and spraying it with paint.

Once we had completed this, we all set off home. On our way back to Buckstone Road, we unblocked the drainage pipe we put in Crag Lane in and had a look at the patch of Japanese knotweed which we have been trying to eradicate over the last 10 years. We found two or three shoots, but, fortunately, this is only a tiny fraction of the colony that was there a few years ago.