Back to the Ham Lands this morning on a cool but dry day. Sharon of the Friends of Ham Lands was there to meet us as usual, and led us amongst the trees into an area where our help was needed.

The task was to cut down young cherry trees, which had been springing up from the roots all around a larger parent tree. We needed to use loppers and handsaws to cut them down as close to the base as possible to avoid leaving stumps for walkers to trip over.

This was a lot of fun as the trees were immature enough to make cutting them down quite easy, and the group got stuck in and made huge progress very quickly alongside the FOHL members.

There were a number of big canvas bags dotted around and these were filled repeatedly with all the saplings and emptied in the undergrowth, the growing pile standing testament to the efforts everyone was making.

As usual, after the group photo we headed over to the Swiss Bakery for coffee and treats. Our next time on the Ham Lands will be on 10th June - sign up now to come along here: https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/richmond-big-green-week-helping-the-happy-ham-landers

The Friends of Ham Lands welcomed 6 cheery GoodGymers (and Hunter the pooch) on a much brighter and drier Saturday morning than was expected for a second go at the brambles along the pathway we worked on last month.

It’s always great fun to get together with the FoHL and help them with their ongoing efforts to preserve the green spaces of the Ham Lands for the benefit of walkers and local residents. This time, Sharon brought along a couple of boards showing an aerial photo of the area in 1944 and a map from 1841, when the topography of the area was quite different from today.

We were armed with loppers and shears and headed out along the path in twos and threes, cutting back the brambles and gathering them in large canvas sacks, all the while catching up on each other’s news and the events of the moment.

Those brambles can be nasty and the murmur of chat was punctuated by the occasional “ouch” (or a slightly less polite term) as several of us received our scratch of the day, but these didn’t spoil the merry mood as we did our bit for nature to get the weekend off to a good start.

The prospect of a visit to the Swiss Bakery helped our motivation and we soon settled down to excellent (tiny) coffees and delicious flammenkuchen and quiche as reward for our efforts. Guten Appetit!

Next visit to the Ham Lands is on the Easter weekend so we will be updated soon on whether this will affect it. Keep an eye out for changes to the listings!

Part of our mammoth tree planting task at Petersham Common. An absolute pleasure to welcome GoodGymmers from other areas, and first timers Andreeca, Anastasia, Tim and Laura. What a brilliant first task to be part of: creating a lasting legacy in our beautiful green borough.

Ken gave us a brief introduction to the Common and woodlands restoration which included restoring the middle layer of the woodland. He explained how there was an upper canopy and ground floral plain but how the woodlands was mismanaged for around 50 years and had the middle understory canopy removed regularly. We were helping to plant 25,000 trees to restore this vital habitat where most of our native songbirds nest in the understory between the ground and 5m height.

Ken gave us a demonstration of how to plant a tree and told us about how it was vital to get the plant at the right level in relation to the roots and the stem so it had a good chance of survival.

We set about into the woods with native trees soaking their roots in buckets of water and started planting bird blocks of trees happily chatting away with each other. In no time we had planted 500 trees between us and Ken was very pleased with our work and thanked all of us from the Petersham Common Conservators.

We are back to plant more on Monday 6th March, sign up for the session to join us.