Green Appleton
This is going to be a page of many thank yous, as all things pond are moving quickly!
The developments are discussed in more detail in our Blog, but suffice it to say
that the Parish Council have taken ownership of the pond, which means that someone will be responsible for it long
term and this will be very helpful in developing it for biodiversity and as a village asset.
John Page and his crew of extremely hardy volunteers have done two work sessions at the pond, as work needs to be done in the autumn/winter. The results are quite startling!
And our Just Giving page has received many donations, thanks to the generosity of Appletonians, so it looks like we will be able to afford our skip (or similar) and make sure we dispose of the waste in an environmentally-friendly way.
So Thank you to the Parish Council, John Page and everyone who volunteered to help, and also to all those who contributed to our fund.
One or possibly two work sessions are planned at the pond, on 17th and 24th (if required) November in the mornings. If you would like to volunteer, please contact us at greenappleton2021@gmail.com or John Page on 01235 864808. For financial help, please consider making a donation on our Just Giving page at www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/greenappleton.
A massive thanks to all those who made our last repair cafe such a success - repairers, cafe staff and everyone who brought
such a fascinating mix of items for mending. We were all really busy, and the place had a lovely buzz to it, as people
worked or feasted on the cake (volunteered by our helpers) as they waited for a repair.
Stats and photos will come soon, when we've got our breath back!
The iNaturalist section of the site has had an overhaul and an update - go and have a look!
We are involved in several projects. You can see what's going on in all of them by clicking the buttons
at the top of the page, or you can get a flavour of them in the sections below.
The first project that Green Appleton took on was restoring a designated area of the churchyard to meadow.
The part of the churchyard was carefully chosen to avoid new graves, and a plan put in place to mow in the manner used for meadows and to develop it as a habitat
The plan is to encourage more wildflowers to grow in the older area of the churchyard (The South side towards the Manor). The idea is to make these areas more beautiful as well as creating a habitat for the creatures that live there.
We have set up four photo stations, three in Besselsleigh Woods and one in the churchyard, where people passing can take photographs of exactly the same spot, and then upload them to this website.
In this way, we hope to produce a record of how these spots change, over the seasons and from year to year.
This should give us a picture of seasonal change in the woods, and also indicate longer term change as a result of factors like climate change.
The project has been running for over a year and we have a full seasonal cycle of photographs.
As part of our project encouraging people to value and interact with nature, we have bought a camera trap, and have put it out in various places around Appleton.
The camera trap has a motion sensor in it, which triggers when anything moves in its field of vision and causes the camera to take a photo and record a short video.
The camera also has an infrared sorce, meaniing it can take photos at night.
In this way, we can record information when there are no people around, giving us a glimpse of the secret lives of the wildlie around us.
As part of our sustainability efforts, we have started running a repair cafe in the village hall. We started in November 2024 and have been holding them approximately quarterly since then.
We have a team of handy repairers who offer sharpening, small electricals, and sewing repairs, but really can have a go at almost anything.
The repairs are accompanied by a cafe where you can get a tea/coffee and a piece of cake - all for free!
We have set up a project on the network of iNaturalist so that local people can record the flora and fauna of our local area.
iNaturalist is a world-wide network of observations of the natural world. People take photos of a speciman and add then to the network, and the phone/computer logs the time and place of the observation and uses Computer Vision to identify it. This observation is then looked at and given a firm identification.
The data is used by many scientific projects, and also by us to get a picture of the local biodiversity, and to encourage people to get out and look more closely at the natural world.