Lynchmere Common - Scrub a dub dub

How does the rhyme go.... Scrub a dub dub, two men with a shrub?

Sunday was a gloroious day for getting outside and finishing off some of the winter work. We're at the end of winter work season now. The last of the work needs to be sensitive to wildife in the spring, particularly the rare ground nesting birds that are easily disturbed. We worked on an area of the Lynchmere commons that is entirely managed by volunteer effort (if I count the grazing shetland cows as volunteers as well).



Over the last few years the volunteers have slowly expanded the area of restored heathland clearing scrub as we go.

We had a good turn out with over 20 people joining in through the day and we mainly cleared silver birch and common gorse, where it's growth is starting to affect the regeneration of the heather underneath.






We completed a corridor between two areas already cleared and we found a lot of the much more rare dwarf gorse mixed with the common gorse. In future we should have a good selection of heathland plants in this area. Not to mention a good view as well.

Not all of the scrub is burned. Some is left to provide a habitat and fringe to the woodland areas. I prefer to waste as little of the cut scrub as possible although the volunteers are renowned for having big fires. But each year we are finding a way to use more.


Here is a load I prepared earlier.

Some goes to the deadhedging around our newly planted hazel coppice and I use some for bean poles or pea-sticks and store bales of birch spray to make besom brooms with later in the year. This load should produce all of these as I work it up in the next couple of weeks.