Himalayan balsam has proved a problem in the woods for many years - it looks pretty but the enormous stands of it drive out any other species. It's difficult to get rid of becuase the seeds stay in the ground even after the plant has been romoved. But we are going to give it a go - groups from the Earth Trust and Green Appleton have had balsam pulling sessions, and will continue to do this over a few years and hopefully this will reduce the problem. We have installed a new photo station by the main area where we have pulled the balsam, and hopefully the photos taken here will show the seasonal growth of the balsam and just maybe its reduction over a few years. So take a photo here as you enter the woods and add it to the sequence on the website!
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.