The original intention this morning was toclear the ditches feeding Adel Pond, and litterpick around the cricket club, and Crag Lane. However, yours truly and his better half have had covid this week, so plans had to be modified.
Judith, our ever resourceful treasurer, stepped into the breach and led a successful litterpicking team of five litter pickers, focusing on Stairfoot Lane carpark, Adel Crag and the area around the picnic tables.
They found plenty to keep them busy – mainly doggy doo doo bags and glass bottles.
So thank you to all who picked up litter today!
Since David Preston and his team of Meanwood Valley Volunteer Rangers cleared a lot of the scrub around Adel Crag, it is looking a lot better.
A beautiful morning, but – By Gum – it was cold first thing! It took your correspondent 20 minutes to scrape the ice off the car windows – including inside! Nevertheless, eleven Friends turned out for this morning’s work party. Five of us litterpicking. and the rest of us path clearing. And it was a lovely day for working in the woods.
The litter pickers picked up about six bags of rubbish on Buckstone Road, the Village Green, Crag Lane, the Hospice Woodland and on the track down to the cricket pavilion.
For the path clearers the objective this morning was to improve the path running alongside Adel Beck. Historically, there has been a path by the beck on the Alwoodley side all the way from Stairfoot Lane bridge down to the Spring Hill bridge, just downhill from the Slabbering Baby. However, in recent years the path has become overgrown and muddy and its route unclear at the halfway point, in the region of Adel Bog. Our focus today was to work on the path from Spring Hill bridge up to the midway point.
Getting under way: the path by Adel Beck – Spring Hill bridge can just be seen to the right
Near Spring Hill bridge, the path had been eroded away by the beck, making it a bit hazardous, as can be seen in the photograph above. One of our first jobs was therefore to move the route of the path further away from the stream and remove brambles and a large sapling which was growing across the path.
Looking towards Spring Hill Bridge
The main things to tackle today were brambles and holly which were making the path very narrow – even before the growing season starts again.
Making our way home
In the space of two hours we were able to accomplish our aims, though there is still a lot to do – principally to improve the muddy sections of the path and to improve way marking.
BeforeAfterViews of Spring Hill Bridge before and after clearing brambles and saplings
The two photographs show the difference made in the vicinity of Spring Hill bridge. The tree on the left can just be seen in the “before” photograph though it is obscured by the brambles which we removed. You can also see to the right of the tree the stump of the large sapling which we removed because it was growing across the path.
Adel Beck path looking upstream from the vicinity of Spring Hill bridge – after clearing and widening the path
Another satisfying and successful morning for the Friends of Adel Woods!
Today was our third and final bracken pulling morning on Adel Moor.
Despite rain as we got up – and an unpromising weather forecast – it turned out yet again to be a lovely morning. Again we had a lovely group of seven enthusiastic and hardworking Friends.
We set ourselves the target of clearing a triangular area of bracken adjacent to the area we cleared last Wednesday. And we more or less achieved our aim! The first photograph below shows the area at 10.11 am, and the second photograph shows the same area two hours later at 12.15 pm, after we had finished carrying all the pulled bracken to a compost heap in the woods.
Before pulling bracken……and after.
If you think that bracken looks good and are wondering why we pull it up , the brown patches in the photo above give an indication: where bracken has been established for a while, all other plants die off and we are left with a monoculture of bracken. Fortunately, quite a lot of heather and bilberries were hanging on under the bracken we pulled up. Bilberries and heather are both typical and desirable moorland plants. In the photo above, the bilberries are the green plants in the middle right.
At this time of year the moor looks fantastic – as you can see from the next two photographs.
Heather on Adel Moor, 24th August 2022
The post and brown tube you can see in the foreground of the photograph above is used by mason bees and leaf cutter bees and is part of a study by Leeds University to understand more about bee biodiversity in urban areas.
Heather on Adel MoorThree tired but happy Friends of Adel Woods
For more information about bracken pulling on Adel Moor, see our blog posts for the 10th August and 17th August.
Today was the first ever Friends of Adel Woods event to take place on a weekday.
It was Barbara’s idea to have three midweek events during August focusing solely on removing bracken from Adel Moor. We have two more coming up – on Wednesday the 17th and Wednesday the 24th.
For those of you reading this in a few weeks, months or years time, we are currently in the middle of a heatwave, the second in less than a month, and it was already very warm by the time we met at 9.55 am on Buckstone Road. Despite the heat, we had a fantastic turn out of ten Friends, including three new volunteers.
Bracken pulling on Adel Moor: Getting started
Friends of Adel Woods and the council have done a lot of work on the moor over the last thirteen years and it is looking fantastic. However, it is a constant battle to remove bracken, brambles and saplings. Bracken is particularly invasive and will eventually smother other plants which we wish to see on the moor.
Bracken pulling on Adel Moor: an hour and a half later!
In an hour and a half of diligent activity we were able to clear an area which I would estimate as similar in size to a 25 metre swimming pool – a fantastic achievement. You can see from the photo above, that where the bracken has overrun an area, there is very little other vegetation underneath it. However, heather and bilberries were still hanging on. [By the way, the two photographs above were taken from the same spot, but I didn’t point the camera in quite the right direction for the second].
Unfortunately, it takes a determined and regular effort to remove bracken from an area. However, we are hopeful that as bracken pulling work continues, the heather and bilberries will be renewed.
Adel Moor: looking towards the south.
Adel Moor has a population of viviparous lizards, though we did not see any today. In the last three years, green hairstreak butterflies have also been found here.
We are continuing the work of bracken pulling next Wednesday, the 17th August, and on Wednesday the 24th August. All are welcome – see our home page for more information.
Today it was a beautiful day – you wouldn’t think that only five days earlier there was snow on Park Row and the Headrow!
An elite team cleared paths, litterpicked and recycled the Christmas Wreaths for re-use next year. Only 291 days to Christmas!
While Steph, Win and Michelle litterpicked and worked on the wreaths, David, Andrew and your correspondent ventured into the woods to clear holly from the paths.
David took time to demonstrate arcane Tai Chi techniques with bow saws!
The Parks Department have been doing a fair amount of work in the woods in the last week or two – felling trees, and bulldozing the cycle track on the other side of Stairfoot Lane (nothing to do with Friends of Adel Woods). We were shocked to discover that they had removed our pile of crushed sandstone – apparently to improve the bridle path on the other side of Stairfoot Lane.
A beautiful if cold morning. Despite the nippy start, a good turnout of fifteen Friends, all in good humour, met in the Stairfoot Lane carpark.
We had a group of litterpickers, a group of path clearers, and a chain gang adding five new steps to the top of the steps from the stream.
Your correspondent was embedded with the chain gang, helping Ade to load wheelbarrows with the remains of our pile of crushed sandstone in the carpark and to take them down to the steps. Hence all of the photographs today are of this aspect of our work.
Five new steps were artistically sculpted into the hillside under the expert guidance of Steve Joul. Of course not everyone took it so seriously!
You couldn’t make it up!
“Aren’t they good!”
At about noon our intrepid team of path clearers arrived having cleared branches from paths as far afield as the Seven Arches and Adel Bog. They were desperate to try out the new steps.
We finished at about about 12.30pm, in good spirits.
Thank you to everyone who took part today. You have changed history!
A big thank you to a team from Deloitte who, under Steve Joul’s leadership, successfully carried out the gargantuan task of tidying up the Hospice Woodland.
The woodland had become rather overgrown and the team had to remove brambles, branches and even some trees to re-establish reasonable access. A member of the FOAW committee has walked through the woodland and says that as a result of Deloitte’s work it has been vastly improved.
Friends of Adel Woods 