Kilminning Community Nature Reserve Sunday March 31st – planting day! 10:00 – 16:00
The wetland construction has been more or less completed and the tarmac is covered with soil. Please come along on Sunday, March 31st to help us prepare and clean up the nature reserve ready for nature and the spring. The main priority is to sow the wildflower meadow on the newly covered tarmac. Please come along and help. We have 0.7 hectares to plant (about 1.1 football pitches in size). The simple plan for anyone who comes on the 31st, is to take a 10 or 20 square meters patch of bare soil, rake it, spread some seed and then rake it again. Repeat until you run out of motivation or energy! Some bits are quite soil like, others stony or clay, so preparing the soil has varying degrees of difficulty depending on which bit you go for. Ten square meters might take twenty minutes to do, or it might take much longer. It’s a big job, but not so big if we have a lot of people. If you can volunteer, even for 30 minutes, it will be very helpful. You could mark out the bit of meadow you have prepared and visit it later in the summer to see the transformation you made possible.
If you really want to get stuck in, there are other jobs to do: we need a littler pick throughout the site so that future litterers will think twice about spoiling the clean, natural site. And the trees we planted two years ago need the grass pulling out of their tree guard tubes, mulching and then retubing and staking to give them the best chance of another good growing season this year. Most of the trees (>90%) that we planted in March 2022 are still alive and growing well, but the winter storms have dislodged many of the stakes and tree guards, so general maintenance for these will be really helpful as well.
So please come and make a day of it; have a look at the new pond and new meadow in its bare, ground zero state and help us rewild it. You can then see the transformation that you will have helped create, over the coming summer and over the years as it gets colonised by wildlife. Let’s hope it’s a nice day, but with rain on the following Monday to get the meadow seeds going!
Please bring a metal rake (not a grass rake – tough rakes needed); spades and large garden forks may even be helpful for some bits. Wooden or rubber mallets will be needed if you want to help restake trees. Gloves for litter picking.
Everybody is welcome. There is something worthwhile to be done regardless of your age, experience or ability. Come and have a wee fight back against the doom and gloom of the climate and biodiversity emergency.