Friends of Memorial Park Task Days in 2025
Here are details of our task days in 2025.
We normally hold them between 10am and 1pm on the last Saturday of each month in the winter and the middle and last Saturday from spring until November:
If you are interested becoming a volunteer with us please get in touch and we will add you to our Task Day notifications.
Volunteers are 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.
A fine, sunny morning on the last Saturday in March saw an intrepid band of fifteen volunteers cheerfully helping to maintain our park as the splendid place it is.
The flower beds are looking especially attractive at this time of year with spring flowers in full bloom. We continued weeding and generally tidying them up. The snowdrops have now finished flowering so bunches of them were split and replanted, ensuring that there will be twice as many spread around the park next spring.
Other tasks included pruning the roses and hawthorn around the band-room garden, cutting back brambles on the woodland walk, removing docks from the wildflower patch, examining and loosening the ties around saplings that were planted three years ago and trimming the shoots from the bases of mature trees. And, of course, the on-going litter-pick which doesn't seem to be so needed at the moment.
Thanks go out to all members of the public who support us in various ways and especially to the two young couples on a passing canal boat who insisted on giving us biscuits to enjoy with our tea and coffee at break time.
We enjoyed a lovely morning on the park; warm and sunny
There were lots of people, children and dogs enjoying the park and the newly emerging spring flowers, despite the wet and muddy conditions. The team cleaned up the growth round the trees in Garth Road and the large lime tree behind the bowling green pavilion. As ever there was lots of weeding to do and tidying in the main flowerbeds. We also managed to tackle more of the fallen dead tree, taking the large branch away.
Many thanks to the 17 intrepid volunteers who turned out for the first Task Day of 2025, a cold but brilliantly sunny morning in the park.
One of the main jobs this time of year is tidying up the flower beds, especially those around the War Memorial. We're now seeing snowdrops flowering in the beds bringing some welcome brightness and there are even some bulbs already starting to shoot. We also removed branches which had been blown off during the recent storms. This included cutting off as much as we could from the dead tree that had fallen near the Sundial. Lots of smaller branches were also collected from around the park, and we did our usual litter pick.
Other tasks included making a start on weeding and tidying up underneath the benches - we've asked the Council to stop weed-killing around the benches, trees and edges which is environmentally unfriendly and looks unsightly. Preliminary investigations were also carried out concerning the feasibility of the group replacing the timbers which frame the Boules Court and are rotting away.
We left the park looking considerably more respectable than when we arrived, doing our best to work round all the changes in the park as part of the construction of the new Community Hub.
