Bank Holiday Boost: 34 Volunteers Transform Didsbury Park
TODAY - BANK HOLIDAY
Despite the challenge of volunteering on a Bank Holiday today we still had an excellent turnout of 34 volunteers. It was great to see Emma and Ian taking advantage of being free on a Bank Holiday to rejoin us once again, Grace being well enough to volunteer again and some of our younger volunteers coming along with parents on a day off from school. In addition we were delighted to welcome Caroline, a new local volunteer for the first time. Everybody was made very welcome.
TODAY'S BIG PROJECT - THE CREATION OF A NEW FLOWER BED
Our volunteer work started early this morning. At 7am when the park was quiet, Geoff brought his mechanical digger into the park and with Denise on safety duty, he managed to uproot some very well established old laurel bushes in line with the new design for the flower bed. Thank you Geoff and Denise - this was a huge task which definitely needed mechanical help.
Picture 1 shows the amazing results of the digging and the team of Chris, Lesley, Katie and Caroline standing by to clear it all away. Some of the larger roots did require the assistance of some additional muscle provided by Tristan, Thanh and Chris before all the site was finally clear of laurel. Once the laurel was cleared, picture 2 shows Caroline, Chris and Katie digging over and levelling the remaining soil and finally after a long mornings hard work picture 3 shows Chris, Caroline, Thanh and Katie proudly admiring the fantastic resulting new flower bed. Thank you to everyone involved including Sonia who oversaw this whole process. We have ordered 1 tonne of compost to be added to this bed and then we plan to add lots of summer plants to provide lots of colour to this area for the first time. Thank you to everyone who made this huge improvement to the park today.
I would also like to say a special thank you to Debs who works behind the scenes at MCC to ensure that we always have a green waste skip every week. This has sometimes been touch and go in the past with the skip company when it is a Bank Holiday Monday but today it worked like clockwork and we had an empty skip ready to fill up with the laurel plants we had removed. Thank you Debs.
TODAY - THE CONTINUED FIGHT TO RECOVER THE WILD FLOWER MEADOW
Thanks to a delivery this week of 100 yellow rattle plugs from Will White from MCC we were able to tackle some of the remaining grasses in the wild flower meadow. A team of Diane, Wendy, Sandra and John carefully planted the plugs in the densest grass areas on the wild flower meadow. Fingers crossed that these help to eradicate the wild grasses. Thank you team
TODAY - A LITTER PICKER TOUR-DE-FORCE
PIcture 4 shows our litter picking heroes returning to the shelter with bags full of litter after a thorough litter pick across the whole park.
Aided by 2 parents, the picture shows Jeremy and his 2 pals proudly displaying the results of several hours work each in the park this morning. Well done guys - this is excellent work! Thank you!!
TODAY - WEEDING, WATERING & FEEDING
It is fair to say that at the moment we are chasing the increasing abundance of weeds in the park.
Picture 5 shows Luke, Lorna and Joyce starting to tackle weeds in the large flower bed opposite the rockery. Picture 6 shows Tristan, on his knees weeding the flower bed near the Sandhurst Road pedestrian entrance and picture 7 shows Lesley and Sandra, also on their knees tidying up the flower bed behind Buddy and Lucy. Denise and Louise worked hard on weeding the rose beds, feeding them with seaweed fertilizer and then spraying the greenfly which had appeared on the roses - a comprehensive piece of maintenance thank you.
At the other end of the park Lorna dedicated most of her time to giving the emerging flowers along the Flower Walk, a much needed watering. Lorna can be seen watering the emerging giant alliums in picture 8. Thanh also used a water bowser to give the new pyracantha plants another welcome watering this week too. Thank you to everyone involved in these important activities to preserve our plants and keep our park looking good.
TODAY - MOWING, PLANTING CANNAS AND POPPY PATH MAINTENANCE
Gary once again used his expert grass mowing skills and cricket pitch marking skills to cut and mark out the new cricket pitch on the sports field. It was amazing today that almost before the paint had dried on the cricket pitch there was a young family who immediately moved onto it and started using it. Well done Gary. Once the pitch was finished Gary moved on to mowing the area around Buddy and Lucy.
Picture 9 shows Gary mowing near Buddy and Lucy. In the background of picture 9 Alan can be seen delivering more Cannas bulbs again this week. Like last week these dramatic plants were planted by Alan in the rockery area. Also in the background of picture 9 Tom can be seen as he returns to his maintenance work on the bottom end of the Poppy Path. A big thank you to Gary, Alan and Tom for undertaking all these great activities.
TODAY - ELSEWHERE IN THE PARK
-A big thank you also today to Gill N, Emma and Grace who together not only made sure that all the lecterns were updated with the latest annual programme of events happening in the park during 2025 but also re-filled all the dog bag dispensers at all the park entrances. Thank you Gill, Emma and Grace.
-Once again we must thank Brenda for doing an amazing job around the Gillbrook Road entrance. Not only was the inside of the park looking spotless but the narrow street leading to this park gate looked amazing too. Thank you once again Brenda
-Picture 10 shows, Carl N, our sole member of the heavy gang today, as he temporarily reinstates the kick fencing prior to us setting up the new bench area. Thank you Carl, this looks much better
-Once again today we were the recipients of some very generous support from a member of our community when we were contacted by Rosemary offering to donate some power tools to us. Thanks to Allan and John who visited Rosemary this morning and returned with a hedge trimmer, leaf blower and a power washer. Thank you Rosemary these will be a great help.
NEXT WEEK - IMPORTANT 'MCC VOLUNTEER WEEK' FILMING NEXT MONDAY
We have recently been approached by a couple of MCC agencies who are very interested in publicising the fact that we are rapidly approaching the milestone of completing 50,000 hours of volunteer work since we started volunteering in November 2014. They want to make this a feature in the MCC Volunteer Week activities at the beginning of June. As part of this activity, a small team will be coming along next Monday (12th May) to video us at work in the park and to interview us about why we do what we do. If you would like to be interviewed can you give some thought this week into what you might like to say.
Incidentally we have just passed the 49,000 hours milestone today and so I would expect us to pass the 50,000 hours of volunteering milestone by the end of July at the latest.
Another interesting fact is that if we calculated our labour value at the National Minimum Wage rate of £12.21 per hour then the Didsbury Park Volunteers will have contributed the equivalent of £610,500 to Didsbury Park in labour alone in the last 10.5 years.
Thank you once again for your amazing support.