Planting out on clay banks

I haven’t been out with Ruth’s Stroud Valleys Project group for ages, and we met up at Dock Lock today for a planting task on the new section of canal near Oldbury Brook. The canal there is dry at the moment while the engineering work is being completed. There are steep clay banks to keep everything watertight, however we need some vegetation at the water level to start re-generating. A whole load of plants were saved from a separate part of the canal a few weeks ago, so the job today was to create a couple of rows along the banks. However, the far side proved to be too steep and dense for digging, so in the end we stuck to just one bank. There was a lot of pfaffing to start with trying to estimate exactly where the water line would fall, but once it was established, it was relatively straightforward to open out a slit in the clay and push the plants in. Balsam pulling season has also begun, and there was quite a bit along the Oldbury Brook. I joined the team there after a while to…