We’re in a routine now. The days shorten and the nights lengthen. We stomp on a Sunday and fix stuff on a Saturday
We had to fix the litter. Sad demoralising work. Some humans aren’t worthy of this lovely fragile world.
I suspect that those that throw their crap into our precious planet would label us as dogooders. As if doing good was worthy of a slur.
But when dogooders come together there is a whirlwind of love, that intangible thing that motivates us.
We are aware. We are aware that this fragile planet needs a lot of love.
We removed 20 bags of rubbish, some furniture and electrical things that no longer worked. Kind of satisfying in the end.
Stomping is our signature activity. We do that to encourage life. Churning up mud brings seeds to the surface.
Nodding bur marigold is a declining wildflower. Its seeds stick to our clothes fall off and grow somewhere else. If they fall off as we stomp we create the perfect habitat for them.
We’ve already been out three times this year and we have created a lovely seed bed which is also popular with snipe when we’ve gone
We’ve got our scythes out too, sharpened them up and started to cut back the vegetation. This keeps the marsh from becoming overgrown
Not only does this prepare the ground for stomping but then we rake up the vegetation we’ve cut and heap it up. The heaps are valuable. Not to us so much as for the life on the marsh.
The heaps we built last year are still there, slowly decomposing. Whilst they rot down a myriad life forms use them. Poking around in them proves it. They are a mass of life, invertebrates of many kinds, spiders and worms, beetles and snails. When the marsh floods they become islands. Ducks and gulls perch on them.
We go into the heart of the marsh but not all that often. We like to leave it in peace for most of the time. But we like people to visit and appreciate it so we have made the path along the edge much easier to use.
But our dams hold back water and the path is often wet.
So we laid a few tons of stone down to raise it up and keep it dry.
All the while we were serenaded by Cetti’s warblers. There’s at least 7 along his bit of the path. They like a wild wetland. Perhaps the drought has made them seek out somewhere wild and wet when most of the countryside was bone dry.
We also like to party. A Marshian party is of course deep in the marsh. For one day we all get together and share food and drink, jokes gifts and knowledge.
We also invite people who might never have been to the marsh before. The response is normally “wow, I never knew this place existed, and so close to Reading”
And it was a Sunday. A stomping day. So we got the partygoers to the stomping ground, where they got muddy and inevitably happy. Most people like to play in the mud!
The wow is because deep down everyone loves to get close to nature, and to see it being cared for, and to help care for it too.
