Clearing the brook of Balsam

I can’t quite believe this is my first proper balsam bashing session of the year with Stroud Valleys Project. The plants are now quite tall and in flower, so a critical time to start pulling. We met in the Eastington Industrial Estate, an area I did last year. It was good to see the first section of the river had very little – we spent a lot of time on these banks last year so that seemed to work well. We then made our way up the Oldbury brook towards the new lock where we didn’t have time to complete properly last year. There were quite a few of us, so we managed to split up methodically, with some in the water and others on the bank. We got permission to cross the work site and then we could work on the other side of the brook bank. By around 2pm we had finished a pretty thorough job – both sides of the brook cleared all the way down to the Frome. Will definitely be interesting to revisit this section next year and see how much comes back.