Wed 25th March 2009 - Ryde Cemetery.

This week saw the Green Gym on their second visit to Ryde Cemetery, and some 35 plus people turned up on a dry if somewhat cool and windy day. Our task was basically to continue with the clearance work we were doing on our previous visit, and judging by the huge pile of cleared vegetation we did a super job! The cemetery is really starting to look good and is certainly worth a visit, if only for the amazing amount of historical information on the gravestones which give a fascinating insight into the local community. There appear to be many service personnel remembered here, this time we discovered a Knight Commander of the Bath and someone who took part in the Maori wars of New Zealand at the River Waikato. This river, whose name means Maori for “flowing water”, was the scene of several skirmishes between the British and the Waikato tribes in 1863-65.

Carrie's Nature Lesson.

This week’s fascinating find by Peter was a Woodlouse Spider (Dysdera Crocata - see picture), which are common in southern England, but can found as far as southern Scotland. They are approximately 10 to 15mms long, can vary in colour from creamy-grey to red-brown and their abdomen has the size and appearance of a baked bean. They live under logs, stones and anywhere woodlice might be found, and are one of the few spiders with fangs strong enough to pierce through the hard outer shell of woodlice - hence the name”.

Many thanks to Eddie & Carrie for the text and pictures.

Fri 20th March 2009 - Message from the Blogmaster.

One year ago today, I started using a Google based system to monitor how many people were looking at our blog. I thought you might be interested in the annual report figures........

691 persons have visited the site a total of 1,995 times and looked at 4,202 pages. The amazing thing to me is that they comes from 28 different countries - everywhere from Australia to Russia. Your weekly endevours at Green Gym have a worldwide audience......! Not bad for a simple blog page that was started to keep our less frequent members up to date.

Keep up the good work.

Wed 18th March 2009 - St George's School, Newport.

St Georges School, Watergate Road was our venue this week, a site we have visited several times in the past. It was a glorious bright and sunny day, with an excellent turnout of Green Gymmers to tackle the various tasks. The main one was to transport several tons of limestone chippings via wheelbarrows and rake it over to make a pathway suitable for wheelchairs, to improve access to the woodland area they are transforming. The second was to put down some membrane and cover it with bark chippings, so the weeds did not encroach on the path. The school have made an amazing concrete sculpture and some really cool metal figures which we think are from the film Alien versus Predator – see pictures.

A big thankyou to Carrie for the pics and text this week.

Wed 11th March 2009 - Mornington Road, Cowes.

This week the GG Team were back at Mornington Road, Cowes - for our second visit in 3 weeks. Once again, we seem to have invented another extreme sport - this time it involved old railway sleepers. The sport goes thus - take a pile of used railway sleepers, cut them in half (using only a bow saw) and then haul them up a mountain (well, a steep hill!) and construct a pathway with them. The more energetic members were seen to be picking them up like cabers then running a short distance before tossing them up the hillside.....! Other GGymers were involved with litter picking (they even found a shopping cart) and cutting back the overgrown areas of undergrowth. The weather was kind to us and there was an excellent turnout.

Many thanks to Carrie for the photographs this week.

Wed 4th March 2009 - Sunnycrest Nursery, Newchurch.

Sunnycrest Nurseries was the venue for this week’s Green Gym, a site we have not visited for a while. Apart from the odd snow flurry the weather stayed fine and dry with a sizeable crowd of Green Gymmers soon getting stuck into the main tasks. The first was to plant ninety trees in two separate areas including oak, ash, beech, rowan, hazel and holly; the second was building two raised garden beds which required moving some very large, heavy sleepers, lining the bottom of each and filling them up with soil. This was undertaken by a keen group of spade wielders to fill up the wheelbarrows and another group to wheel them the vast distance to the raised beds (and a jolly long way it was as well!). One of the sleepers appeared to have a small metal disc numbered “74” which apparently (according to Mark) was a method used on the railway back in the day to identify any sleepers which required repair or maintenance and the number was its distance from the mile marker (see picture).

Thanks to Carrie for the text and pictures.