What is required?

All the community woods in our area are either owned or run by a local charity set up for the purpose and run by villagers.  They have developed considerable expertise on the business of acquiring the land; getting public funding for the community wood; and choosing, planting and maintaining the trees decided upon.  The public funding can come either from the Government, through the National Lottery, or from private charities.

What is the benefit?

A community woodland on the allotments, which might be only part of the site, would  benefit the village as a whole in a number of ways:-

1) It would engage the talent we know to exist in the village in matters such as tree selection and maintenance.

2) Everyone in the village, including schoolchildren, can help to look after the site; and the school is of course right next door to the area.

3) A community wood would operate as a green lung for Finstock.  As well as sheltering the houses from the noise of the main road, it would be a place of recreation and enjoyment.  The trees at Diggers Wood are the same as those that existed in the old Wychwood Forest.  If we chose the same mix of trees here, it would be a bit of the old Forest in the very centre of the village.

4) The allotment area is the only land in the village that connects the High Street with the School Road end.  Many children have used it to get to the school safely, without having to cross a busy road.  It bridges many divides.  A community wood would be a symbol of unity.

5) There are thousands of species that benefit from having trees and open space.  This is an area for experts to advise on, but a community wood would be a tremendous benefit to the environment.

Note that I am not advocating woodland alone.  We are talking about a combination of woodland, open space and even space for growing food, which is likely to become a much-sought after facility in years to come.  There is no doubt some scope for conventional ‘development’ of parts of the allotments: extensions to the churchyard, a site for a village hall, and some housing.  But housing alone is not the solution for a village the essence of whose very attraction is its open space.  Merely building more houses will simply increase the pressure on the open space that exists.

Walkers

Many people have walked over the area over the years, and many footpaths have been created in addition to the one public footpath recorded on the definitive map.  It is possible to register these paths on the definitive map, but we are told that it would take seven years and cost £2,000.

The point is that  for years the allotments field served as an open space for the village, a place to walk, exercise dogs and play.  It also became a resort for wildlife, both in the form of rare flowers and as a nesting place for birds.  Spraying pesticide and ploughing the land in order to plant winter wheat have destroyed this resource.

Community wood

There are a number of community woods in villages around Finstock.  There is Little Garden Wood in Ramsden; Leafield Community Wood; Diggers Wood in Shipton; the Centenary Wood in Charlbury; and many others.

Leafield Community Wood

Diggers Wood, Shipton-under-Wychwood

Greenbottle has developed a milk bottle made of cardboard from recycled stationery, with a plastic inner liner, that “consumes about a third of the energy required to make a plastic bottle and has a carbon footprint that is 48% lower than plastic.”  It is only available for the moment at a few stores in Norfolk.

Hi all, I really like the look of this new site idea – WordPress, as i’m sure you’re all realising, has enormous, if not infinite possibility! There are so many ways that this can be used to get the people of the village, and the village organisations that are out there talking and interacting.

I like the layout and design; it works well and is makes the site easy enough to use, though of course i am talking after using WordPress for a while.

Lets just see if this actually leys me post this then…

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090320/ap_on_go_pr_wh/white_house_garden Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Breakell writes in the April/May 2009 Finstock News:-

“The sustainable community strategy for West Oxfordshire is now published under the title Shaping Futures.  A document entitled Core Strategy So Far is out for consultation until April 6th and all documents are available at www.westoxon.gov.uk/planning/LDF.cfm.  It is important to stress that these are very early days and the area of land put forward by the Cornbury Estate bordered by Hill Crescent, the High Street and the Witney Road is shown on the plan.”

I have not seen the area on the plan, but it seems clear from this that the Estate has plans to develop the Church Allotments area.  Presumably this means the prospect of houses covering substantially the whole area.  Is this acceptable to the community?  What effect would such development have?

This note sets out what is known of the history of the site which some know as the Church Allotments and others the Old Allotments or Finstock Field.  At the time of writing I know little more than what others have told me!

Agriculture

Until 2008, the area appears to have been neglected for more than twenty-five years.  Some people in the village remember allotments on part of it, but they have not been worked since the very early 1980’s.  I came to Finstock in 1982, and do not remember seeing any allotments then.

Use by the public

A lot of people have used the area for recreation,  mostly by walking along the one existing public footpath, but also along a large number of other paths.  All these paths were ploughed over and obliterated in 2008 when winter wheat was planted over the whole area; but enough photographs and statements have been taken to indicate that at least some of these paths have become public footpaths which ought to be registered on the definitive map.  Taking this step would, we are told, cost £2,000 and take seven years.

Is it better to recycle your old cartridges or get them refilled? My recent experience suggests that it may be better for your pocket, and also for the environment, to get them refilled by professionals.

Why? for several reasons:-

1) You cannot be sure that all cartridges will actually be reused. Apparently Lexmark undertake to repair and refill their cartridges, but most other firms do not.

2) The refilling or recycling may be done a long eway, even in a far-away country. It can’t be good for the environment to incur unnecessary transport costs.

So is there an alternative?
There certainly is in Witney. You can take your old inkjet cartridge to a firm in Corn St, and they will either refill your cartridge or sell you a refilled one which has been tested for quality, and very often has more ink in it than the original cartridge. I did this yesterday and will report on the quality of the replacements.

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We have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes by living off future generations.

Alternet: why the global economy is a Ponzi scheme and we are all Bernie Madoffs

By Joseph Romm, Climate Progress. Posted March 10, 2009.