Friends of Marple Memorial Park Task Days
The Friends hold regular task days in the park on the last Saturday of each month in the winter and the middle and last Saturday from March to November. Everyone is welcome to join in for as long or as short they wish during the specified times. Please note that children and young people under 18 must be accompanied by a responsible adult.
If you are interested becoming a volunteer with us please get in touch and we will add you to our Task Day notifications.
We like to keep a record of what we get up and here are details of past task days.
A smaller turn-out than we've been getting for a while on this special task day to celebrate National Civic Day and Marple Civic Society's 50th Anniversary. Lost of local groups carried out tasks throughout the Marple area during the morning and then in the afternoon joined Marple Civic Society to celebrate with a picnic lunch and entertainment from Marple's Brass Bands. In the morning we managed to weed the ornamental flowerbeds, which and now getting well established, put another coat of paint on the Bowling Green buildings, tidy the shrub bed near to the Junior Play Area and even do a crown-lift on trees that were swamping the benches near to the Park Keeper's Cottage.
In the afternoon Emily Myers collected a certificate from MP Andrew Stunell to commemorate our participation in National Civic Day. Visit the Marple Website Virtual History Tour for more photos from the Civic Day celebrations.
AT LAST a large amount of plants had arrived, although still not all of them. However, there were enough to make a good start on planting up of our five adopted flowerbeds and with a very good turnout of volunteers there were plenty of willing hands to share the workload. The council had made good progress on the planting of their own flower beds earlier in the week and the Rainbows and Beavers have also got stuck into theirs so all around things are suddenly looking much better. When the remaining plants are delivered it should not be too hard to get finished and we now just need a decent amount of rain to give everything a good watering in. Well done everyone who worked so hard today!
Another good turnout of volunteers enabled us to tackle two main tasks, one was painting of the second bowling green building to match the one we did last year and many hands made light work of this. We also made some repairs to the doors. The second was clearance of weeds from the ornamental beds in preparation for planting. We still don't have all the plants we've ordered for these beds yet but with all the sunshine we've had recently it's perhaps just as well - we need some rain soon! Wooden items including tree sculpture and stocks were treated to another can of preservative and some work was done on the shrub beds too. Well done everyone!
Today we were blessed with a fantastic turnout of volunteers, possibly the most we've ever had. Unfortunately the plants and shrubs for the ornamental flowerbeds have not arrived yet so many hands made light work of a major tidy-up of the two large shrub beds nearest to the park entrance. The whole of the grassed area was also raked of twigs and small branches that had fallen from the trees over winter. In the meantime, Patrick used a whole tin of preservative on the carved Infant Play Area sign and the tree sculptures, which all looked much better for his efforts.
After a break for tea, coffee, ice-lollies and cakes the good work continued on the Sensory Garden, which looked much better for some TLC. Altogether a very successful day's work - so a big thank you to all our new volunteers!
It was so wet overnight, and still raining in the morning, that expectations were pretty low for a productive day. Thankfully the rain held off and we ended up achieving quite a bit more than first thought. Unfortunately the wet did stop us getting properly stuck into the newly adopted flowerbeds but we did at least manage to redefine the edges of the beds. We also weeded and cleared the edges of the paths along the main entrance and up the drive to the car park. We did some more work on the Park Keeper's cottage garden, repaired a bench and had a good tidy up in the Infants Play Area.
We were also pleased to welcome Joyce, our third new volunteer this year!
The weather for our first task day of 2011 was very kind, with a cold frost early on but brilliant sunshine soon warmed things up. We were very pleased to welcome two new volunteers, John and Lorraine, who quickly got stuck in to tidying up around the Park Keepers Cottage and round the composting area near to the boundary alongside the canal. There was also time for a general tidy up of the War Memorial beds and a survey of all the park benches was carried out - there's going to be lots to keep us busy in 2011!
