Monthly Archives: January 2019

Winter Work

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The New Year has seen a number of maintenance jobs completed around the Park.   Firstly,  woodchip has been laid on the bottom path to help making walking easier.   Thanks to Shaun Smith and helper from Elite Garden Maintenance for this.

Next, we have had work done to fix the broken gates, and to replace the vandalised gate on the Kelcliffe Lane entrance.  Thanks to Ian Walker for this.

Finally,  we have started renovating some of the old apple trees; this one is the one that is thought to be a cider apple tree, and was rather a thicket.   We had the hawthorn tree growing too close removed, and have then pruned the apple tree back by around the recommended 25%  to start forming an ‘open goblet’ shape.  We’ll continue the work on the shape in future years.   Hopefully, this will help improve the quality of the fruit – if we have done it right.

Apple Tree Before Pruning

Apple Tree After Pruning

Lunar Eclipse Over Parkinson’s Park

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Super Blood Wolf Moon 21st January 2019

Lunar eclipse over Parkinson’s Park around 4.40am, this is nearly total eclipse. Across the moon are some tree branches. As the eclipse became almost total, some birds began to sing. This is as close as I can get it to what it looked like with the naked eye.

This type of occurance is called a Super Blood Wolf Moon and is a rare phenomenon, caused in part when a lunar eclipse makes the surface of a full moon appear a reddish hue while seeming brighter and closer to earth than normal.  Astronomers are particularly interested in this year’s blood moon as it is the last of its kind for two years.

Tomorrow, a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter will appear in the east sky before sunrise on January 22, showing the two bright planets 2.4 degrees from each other.

(Super Moon information taken from the Sunday Telegraph.)

Learning to Wassail

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To get the Community Orchard into good shape and renovate some of the old apple trees in the Park some of the Friends are attending pruning courses run by the Orchard Project. We are also lucky to have people from the Northen Fruit Growers Association in the area to advise us, as well as the RHS at Harlow Carr.

So, on a cold (-2 degrees) January morning we set off to Tingley to learn how to renovate apple trees and also how to do an Orchard Wassail, an old Anglo Saxon customer to encourage healthy orchards:  ‘waes hael’ means ‘good health’.

For us the Wassail  involved, soaking the tree roots in rough cider, singing a Wassail folk tune, hanging cider soaked toast on the pruned trees, and eating ‘cake and ale’ (or in our case, as we were driving, warm, spiced apple juice).   You can also process through the orchard making a noise with pots and pans to drive away ‘bad spirits’, and dress up as mummers.

An Orchard Wassail is done on ‘Twelfth Night’ – although this could be the modern calendar date of 6th January or the old calendar of 17th January.  We thought that next year we’d give it a go and have our own Parkinson’s Park wassail event.

If anyone would like to help organize it let us know – parkinsonspark@gmail.com.

New Year In The Planning

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The Friends of Parkinson’s Park would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.   Planning is now underway for the 2019 maintenance and event schedule for the Park and now is the time for ideas for Park improvements or events you would like to  get involved in – email us on parkinsonspark@gmail.com with suggestions.

Work on trees safety has already been done by Meadfleet, and we are planning on putting more woodchip paths down just as soon as we’ve sourced supplies and funds.  The Farmgate is in need of repair, along with the latches on two other gates, and that is in hand.  We will also be installing a new gate near the top bench to replace the one that got vandalised Continue reading →