Author: Anne Miller

On a glorious summer day,  21 participants joined us for the pennywort pulling working party, supported by funding from Cambridge Water’s PEBBLE fund.

With fantastic help from Cambridge Canoe club and their members, we had a fleet of 11 canoes out on the river, plus a team working from the bank in Grantchester Mill Pond.

We started with some instruction from Mike on Floating Pennywort, and how to distinguish it from other plants, using a handy patch in the nearby Snobs stream.

We then headed out on the river to find and clear the emerging strandsWe surveyed the whole river, from Mill lane, Cambridge to Grantchester Mill Pond, and removed virtually all visible pennywort.  There were just a few strands identified and left, to be dealt with later from the bank or by canoe. This included one new patch found in a ditch near Fen Causeway that we weren’t previously aware of (now dealt with from the bank)

We then finished with some refreshments… Pennywort drink from Cho Mee supermarket was interesting to try (and is apparently good for arthritis) but more conventional drinks were more popular!

The days’ work will be immensely useful in the eradication process, although I’m sure we’ll all need to remain vigilant to collect regrowth during the summer

Do keep an eye out when you’re on or by the river over the summer, and either remove any that you see, or just let us know and we’ll try to get someone out to deal with it. If you want to keep an eye on progress before you go pennywort hunting , do check the status reports on our website here: https://camvalleyforum.uk/pennywort-status/ 

If you would like to be kept informed of future working parties, do let us know, ideally registering here

Himalayan Balsam is a pretty, but very invasive plant along our riverbanks.  It crowds out everything else, fires its seeds everywhere so they float down the river to colonise new areas. When it dies back in winter the bare soil washes away, increasing erosion and flood risk.

After a meeting to discuss how to deal with it, we were shocked to discover some specimens being carefully tended in the flower beds of  the Red Lion Pub in Grantchester!

We know there are “secret” pennywort pullers, who quietly help remove it from “their” patch of the river

Here is Ed, who keeps an eye out for it between Sheeps Green Cambridge, and Fen Ditton.  Do say Hi if you see him.

Simon takes a large punt up river under dramatic skies, ready for the start of the first Pennywort Hitsquad.

These are follow-on sessions from the Treeworks, with our contractors ML Partnership spending 2 days working their way down the river in a giant punt on loan from Scudamores. Their tasks are pulling out some of the remaining trees that had rooted in the river, removing pennywort-containing-debris, and pulling pennywort.

We have funding from Cambridge Water’s PEBBLE fund and South Cambs Wildlife Enhancement Scheme to run 3 more of these, as needed during the summer and Autumn.

Very pleasingly, thanks to all the work in February and March, there’s currently no pennywort for them to pull, but we know it will appear soon….

 

 

Cam Valley Forum’s 2018 Pennywort Pulling Working Party has been postponed from May to July, due to a very pleasing lack of pennywort to pull! New date is Sunday 8 July, 1:30pm outside Cambridge Canoe Club, followed by refreshments.  Do come as a group or as an individual.  If you have them, please bring rakes, buckets, punts etc! For details and to book (which helps us plan and gets you a reminder) click here.

All are welcome to the Cam Valley Forum AGM at 7pm on Thursday 29th March in the David Attenborough Building, New Museum Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge. CB2 3QZ

Following the AGM, our speaker at 7:45pm will be Catherine Montcrieff of WWF, on “Are we water wise?”

Details here CVF AGM 2018 Notice

 

With thanks to all our funders, and the hard working team from ML Partnership, we’ve now completed 2.8km of treeworks and pennywort clearance on the upper Cam. The team have cleared all the way from the Grantchester Mill Stream to Lammas Land Car Park in Cambridge.

It should be a great help in our battle to eradicate Floating Pennywort from the upper Cam within 5 years

The Environment Agency visited last week, and were so impressed they’ve awarded us/The Wildlife Trust extra funding to allow work to continue downstream, hopefully all the way to Mill Lane, Cambridge.

MLP have developed a slick working method and are making good progress. In the picture above they are working from right (upstream) to left (downstream). The workers are just visible behind the punts, loading them up with brush and pennywort.  The punts are then pulled across the river using a fixed rope to be unloaded on the opposite bank. The debris is left in piles for the farmer to remove or chip. The light green patch on the left of this picture is Floating Pennywort.

We are deliberately leaving a few “habitat refuges” for birds and fish. With the help of the Cambridge Canoe club we are installing protective barriers, which will hopefully stop them becoming completely clogged with Pennywort….. But we’ll find out later in the year whether this works.