Work Day On The Marshes

Last Sunday I took part in my first volunteer work day for the Friends of Tottenham Marshes – clearing an area of scrub to make space for beehives. I barely knew a soul, so it was a confusing day of forgetting peoples names, not knowing where to sit for lunch and generally being the one constantly having to play catch-up. To add to the confusion it was a shared work day with Lea Bridge Conservation Volunteers, who seemed to completely outnumber the Tottenham lot and who I constantly mistook for them. The confusion didn’t matter one bit though as LBCV were a friendly bunch and I think I’ll be joining in with some of their work days in the future.

The area of wooded scrub we were working in was chest deep in nettles and brambles which we mainly cut down using tools with the satisfying name of slashers. The work was sweaty, stingy and thorny but with about a dozen of us working it wasn’t so bad. The picture above shows the area I was working in – wish I’d taken a “before” picture as you can’t really tell from this how much vegetation we shifted. Blackcaps sang all around us as we worked, and not long after we started someone found a nest with two blue eggs in it. It was a blackbird nest, possibly already deserted as it is so late in the year – the eggs were cold. We left it and it’s tree untouched though, just in case.

The day was hot and sunny and I was glad to be working under the shade of Hawthorn and Elder scrub. Out in the bright sunshine a small work party dug over and prepared a flower bed outside the meeting rooms, and there in the fresh turned soil was a tiny newt.

After a leisurely lunch by the banks of the river we went back to the clearing and worked with pitchforks to pile up the vegetation we had cut back. Those tall compost piles will provide a wonderful invertebrate habitat, quickly rotting down to take up less and less space, until it is time to put in the bee hives. We’d got most of the work done before lunch so there was a chance to lean on our tools and look around, a few of us discussing wildlife on the marshes and identifying trees and shrubs in the clearing. Many were laden with fruit, like this bird cherry.

The bank I had been working on was smothered with cascades of fat, sweet sunwarmed brambles which I had spent the morning eating greedily before cutting the thorny branches back. Before calling it a day we combed the remaining bramble thickets and were rewarded with a tasty wild grown treat.

Crab-apple picking

Walking through Finsbury Park yesterday I noticed two beautiful crab apple trees, their leaves all shed but with the jewel like fruits still hanging in profusion. Below these small trees grey squirrels were frantically gathering the hard, crimson apples. They are perfect apples in every way but cherry sized, bullet hard and sour, you wouldn’t want to eat one no matter how seductive they look. If you make a jelly of the fruit however, that is another matter. These pictures were taken last year, when Richard and I gathered three bowls full from his mothers tree. There were so many fruits that it took three people at least an hour to gather them in, and we still hadn’t got them all by the time we stopped. We are still eating the delicious, sweet clear amber jelly from last years crop, and this years crop will probably be gathered this weekend. The trees are native to the UK and so we can forage wild crab apples if we want, but not many people seem to know about these abundant fruits. Which is lucky for the wildlife that relies on the wild crabs bounty; when foraging in the wild I have a personal rule – whatever you are gathering NEVER take more than one third of the crop. To us it may be a delicious treat but to local fauna it is all the food they have.

Lunchtime foraging

On the beautiful late summer walk we took recently, I suddenly noticed that it was time for a little something. We had been walking non-stop in hot sunshine for several hours, and I had been so engrossed in the beautiful hedgerows and field margins along the way that I just hadn’t noticed how hungry I was. Imagine my joy when, as I straightened up from examining some unidentified yellow flowers, the first thing that hit my eye was a beautiful wild apple tree, absolutely laden with fruits.

I must confess I have never seen a more beautiful wild apple tree, nor at a more opportune moment. Its fruits were large, firm and rosy, with a waxy feeling skin. I had always thought that wild apple trees, perhaps the result of a bird depositing a pip on the ground or a carelessly discarded apple core would only yield small sour fruit, but luckily for us this seems to be untrue.

Richard picked this one. It was juicy and a little sharp, but delicious nonetheless.