Friends of Marple Memorial Park Task Days
The Friends hold regular task days in the park on the last Saturday of each month in the winter and the middle and last Saturday from March to November. Everyone is welcome to join in for as long or as short they wish during the specified times. Please note that children and young people under 18 must be accompanied by a responsible adult.
If you are interested becoming a volunteer with us please get in touch and we will add you to our Task Day notifications.
We like to keep a record of what we get up and here are details of past task days.
Beautiful sunshine meant that we could make good progress on our big painting task and we managed to get approximately half of the outside of the Infants Play Area fence painted cream. Other volunteers made great inroads into some much needed management in the Breathing Places woodland area. In addition, another two wooden benches were stripped, sanded, treated and refitted on the main path through the park. Also the backless bench on the driveway had yet more graffiti removed from it.
As part of "Marple Spring Clean" organised by Marple Business Forum, Friends of Memorial Park were pleased to be joined by volunteers from the local community to begin painting the Infants Play Area fence. This is a pretty big task, it had taken several weeks to get the fence prepared and our volunteers did very well to get all of the inside of the fence painted cream. We even managed to make a start on the outside too. There is quite a lot of work left to do and we plan to tackle this in smaller sections during out normal task days over the coming weeks.
A special thank you to All Saints' Church, who made up the majority of the volunteers working on our "Spring Clean" task.
Photos by Arthur M. Procter
Blimey these task days do come round quick when there's two a month!
This time we continued jet washing the Infants Play Area fence, restored two more wooden benches, tackled a tree in the Breathing Places Area that had been blown down in the high winds, weeded the ornamental beds, did some management with the wildflowers in the Breathing Places area and planted some more plants in the War Memorial beds.
Well we were lucky with the weather today and managed to plant some more wildflower plugs in the Breathing Places area behind the library, tidy, weed and plant up the War Memorial beds and also remove the dandy lions from the cinema bed too.
Not may photos taken during this task day though as the photographer was busy jet-washing the Infants Play Area fence to prepare it for painting towards the end of May and there's still a long way to go!
For our first ever mid-month task day we were joined by young people from Community Outreach who helped us to prepare the Infants Play Area Fence ready for painting later in the year. This was part of a special 3 day event organised by All Saints' Church called "Get Out and Love Marple", where 50 young people from all over our community spent 3 days doing random acts of kindness all over Marple. We were very grateful for all the extra pairs of hands to help us sand and scrape off all the loose paint and we were very pleased to get around two thirds of the fence done as it is a BIG job! Whilst this was going on other volunteers tidied shrub beds around the Council Offices too.
In addition, the Sensory Garden bench, which was only refurbished during the February task day, and also the new bench on the driveway into the park fitted in March were both rubbed down again and re-treated because of graffiti.
A lower turn out this month but once again those who did come along excelled themselves! The reading circle bed and borders in the Breathing Place were weeded and wild flower seeds were sown in the circular border. Perennial seeds were sown with Annuals so that we should have a show of colour this year but next year should be even better when the Perennials flower.
Wild flower plugs were also planted and wildflower seeds sown in the square bed next to the library and the never-ending task of weeding the ornamental beds was started for this year. It's great to see everything springing into life again after the winter.
As well as gardening tasks we continued our on-going project to care for the park's benches with the sanding and treatment of two more benches near to the Bowling Green. The Tree Sculpture was also given a jet-wash to remove all the green growth so that it can be given its annual treatment with preservative next month.
