Four of us made the journey to meet up with Natalie (NT Ranger), at the National Trust estate office.
From there, we walked back down the hill to one of the main car parks and surveyed the vast quantities of Himalayan balsam before us!
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| Ready, Steady..................lets get balsam bashing! |
Although Himalayan balsam(Impatiens glandulifera) looks attractive with it's pretty pink flowers, it is an non-native invasive species, and can grow 6 foot high. It's seed heads 'explode' when ripe, dispersing the seeds up to 7 metres away and it competes with local plants, suffocating the natural vegetation. Our task today was to get rid of as much of it as we could to enable the natural vegetation to grow.
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| Balsam, balsam everywhere! |
After a Risk Assessment/safety talk, we got to work. We had taken slashers but, as we were mainly working on slopes and the balsam was in amongst ferns, trees and other vegetation, we all decided that pulling it out would be easier, snapping the stems below each of the lower nodules and smashing the lower nodules, to be sure that the balsam didn't re-root after it was thrown on the ground.
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| Biggest balsam of the day:-) |
The weather was meant to be wet but, apart from a very brief shower, it remained dry and even sunny for some of the day.
Balsam pulling is a satisfying task and great as you can move around chatting to others while you're doing the work. We stopped for our usual coffee break. Sue had promised home-made banana cake, which had been taken from her freezer yesterday evening, as she had previously baked multiple cakes for a number of workdays. On unwrapping it, we found it was a fruit cake instead!
We didn't see much wildlife while we were working except for the company of a little fluffy robin, who came to visit us at break time and lunchtime.
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| ......going, going ...... |
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| ...gone!! No balsam in sight! |
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