Friends of Combe Valley

Friends Meadow and the Discovery Centre

A patch of land generally known as ‘The Mound’ situated to the eastern side of the Discovery Centre car park, was cleared of vegetation and planted with wildflowers seeds and pre-seeded turf as part of the re-wilding of the area around the Discovery Centre.

This involved many hours of scything, scarifying, digging and weeding.

The results were very colourful and attracted a wide range of insects, butterflies, bees, frogs and other invertebrates.

We continue to maintain the meadow, keeping the grass cut low over the winter and we will add some plugs of other perennial wildflowers to replace the annual flowers planted.

Friends of Combe Valley with the help of the team from Greener Futures have built four new raised beds on the southern side of the mound to grow fruit and vegetables for community enjoyment. For more information about this scheme, go to their website Greener Futures.

These beds are now being adopted by the current Groundwork South Green Team who will be growing fruit and vegetables over the season. (The Green Team provides support, training and work experience to help participants improve their landscaping skills, and employability whilst working on a real-life community project.) Groundwork Green team

The Friends of Combe Valley along with Groundwork South and Combe Valley Countryside Park CIC are working together to create a Community Garden with more re-wilding and planting projects.

Planting of new native species hedges and trees – on the northern side and eastern side of the newly adopted recreation ground and from the Discovery Centre eastwards between the two main recreation areas. This area will be temporary fenced to allow the hedge whips to grow safely.

Creation of a play mound with willow structures.

Creation of a tree nursery to grow seeds and saplings into full trees for planting within the park.

Generally improving the Discovery Centre car park area – cleaning up and removing litter, removing brambles and improving the car park banks to help with the re-wilding of wild flower banks.

Improving the area of grassland for 50 metres east of the Discovery Centre up to the drainage ditch, to provide an increased activities area to hold events for children, families and visitors to the park. Similar to ones previously held.

Accessibility

The Greenway is currently the only route that is suitable for wheelchairs. We hope to extend this in the future. Many of the kissing gates have padlocks which can be opened using a master Radar key. Please be advised that not all kissing gates have this type of lock. We are investigating this issue to make all locks accessible to all. More kissing gates were installed during 2023 to inhibit trail bikes being brought into the park. Other steps to increase security will also be investigated.

Security

The warden project was established with support from the Sussex Police Rural Crimes Team to give park users a better feeling of safety and the regular reports to the police have supported this. See more on Wardens