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.
The council fixed their tractor and cleared our green waste area at last, so we started filling it again!
Today's tasks included our regular maintenance of the Band Room garden and mowing around the long grass triangle - we do this so it looks like we've left it long intentionally rather than neglected it - we'd love some feedback on whether you like the long grass being left in the park or not?
We also got stuck into the shrubs and bushes at the front of Hollins House and the two beds adjacent to the car park, which we'd left a bit too long since the last time.
We did a litter-pick and a bit of strimming around various fixtures and fittings too.
Thank you to park users who left almost £30 in our collection bucket.
We stayed mostly dry and only had to shelter from the rain a couple of times!
A disappointing start to this task day was the discovery that someone has placed horse-muck around the vandalised tree at Lock 11. We've cleared this up and reported the act to local councillors, the council and police with a warning that it appears to be another action with malevolent intent towards the young people who use the area.
We managed to mow the band room garden and triangle before the rain came. We also weeded the new wildflower bed, which is starting to show some positive signs, worked on the main beds and did a litter-pick and some sweeping in the Infants Play Area. Park use was quite due to the weather but we still had £12 in our bucket by the end of the day.
It's good to see the bed behind the toilet block is recovering after the council's contractor trashed it last year but wish they hadn't painted those dark brown patches!
Park visitors were generous with their comments and pockets
Tasks today involved finishing work on the section of shrubbery alongside Hollins House that we started last time, the regular maintenance work on the Bandroom Garden and continuing the endless maintenance work on the main flowerbeds. This included edging the beds, tidying the paths, weeding and planting new additions.
We also fitted an edging frame to the artwork on the gable end of the Bowlers Hut that we hope will stop the winter weather from getting into them for a while.
It was a very good day for the park bucket with visitors making many positive comments and depositing over £40, thank you!
These sunny days are wonderful but the park is desperate for rain!
Watering is a time-consuming job even though we try to limit this as much as possible. We normally only do things freshly planted, the allotment beds, Danny's pots and, more recently, our new wildflower bed. Unfortunately the hot weather is now stressing a lot of the new trees in the park, so we did as many of these as we could too in the hope that we don't loose them.
Other tasks today included the never-ending weeding of the flowerbeds, mowing of the band room garden and triangle, tidying around Hollins House and some weeding in the library woodland, where we did manage to find a little shade. We also had our hottest team on the annual make-over of the French Boules Court, which was a challenging task in this weather.
It was good to see Helen Middleton braving the heat to work on the final stages of the Skatepark Art Project too.
We squeezed in a special Task Day to finish our experimental wildflower bed
A small group of volunteers were at the park today to complete the wildflower bed started during the Treasure Hunt Task Day last weekend.
As many people will know, our first attempt at a large wildflower meadow in the park a couple of years ago wasn't very successful.
So this time we've down-scaled to a more manageable size so that we can experiment to find out what works best before trying to do something so big again.
The bed has been cleared and planted with Yellow Rattle plugs grown at home by our volunteers. We've also sown seed today, including some that was supplied to us by Cheshire Wildlife Trust, who have also given us the Pollinator Patch stickers too. We've staked and roped it off in the hope that visitors to the park will stay off the bed and keep their dogs off too please.
A wonderful day for a Family Treasure Hunt!
We were focused mainly on our Treasure Hunt today but volunteers still found time to mow the Band Room garden, the long-grass triangle and do a litter-pick. However, the main task of the day for those who weren't handing out programmes and chocolates, or selling raffle tickets and sowing seeds with Little Growers, was clearing of the bed just next to our stall. This was adopted by the Scouts last year but by mutual agreement we've taken it back and plan to use it as an experimental wildflower bed. It was back-breaking work but they did it!
The Treasure Hunt was a great success financially and everyone seemed to enjoy it and gave great feedback too.
We're still waiting for some of the money to come in, so we'll give a full update on the Treasure Hunt Page when the dust settles. We do know that we raised £382 on the raffle, £64.50 thanks to Marple Youth Project's Cake Sale, £20 selling cards, £25 selling jewellery and £161 in donations. So with the £2,516 of sponsorship received so far we've achieved a wonderful £3,169!
