Peacefully at home on 8th September 2022.
Celebration service: Buckhorn Weston Church, 6th October, 2pm.
No flowers; donations please to St Margaret’s Hospice c/o Howard F. Miles, Funeral Director 01963 440367
Sue Hawksley
Visiting Artists Tindall Recital Series | Sherborne School
Huw Wiggin (saxophone) and John Lenehan (piano) join forces in this duo which has been described as “a sympathetic and imaginative partnership”
Thursday 6 October 2022, 7.30pm
Tindall Recital Hall, Sherborne School
Tickets £12.50 01935 812249 [email protected]
Administrative Assistant – Referrals | Mosaic
Hours 10 hours
Salary £5200 (£19500 fte)
Base: Milborne St Andrew, Blandford, DT11
Would you like to join an enthusiastic, friendly team, working for a children’s charity in Dorset? The successful candidate will be responsible for supporting the Referral Team, dealing with schools, local authorities, parents and counsellors. Processing referrals and reports.
Requirements:
Minimum 1yr administration experience
Excellent communication, telephone and networking skills
Excellent organisational skills and time management
Ability to work as part of a team
Excellent knowledge of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook)
Closing date: Friday 30th September 2022
Further details and application form available from:
01258 837071, [email protected]
Registered Charity: 1158138
Qualified Sessional Counsellors/Therapists | Mosaic
Mosaic is a Dorset wide charity offering support to bereaved children, young people and their families facing the death of a loved one.
We are seeking fully qualified counsellors/therapists as sessional workers in North and West areas of Dorset and Purbeck. If you have experience of working with bereaved children, young people and their families and would like to be part of our friendly and supportive team, please contact us for further information and an application form.
Requirements:
BACP or similar accreditation in Counselling
Minimum of 2 year post qualification
Experience of working with children, young people and families
Driving licence
Further details and application form available from:
01258 837071, [email protected]
www.mosaicfamilysupport.org.uk
Registered Charity: 1158138
Stur’s not for cars
Monthly updates from the various North Dorset Police Teams. This month’s news is from Sturminster Newton’s PCSO 5352 Mandy Robinson
The pedestrianised section of Sturminster Newton’s Station Road comes under attention after reports of an increased amount of traffic
Station Road in Sturminster Newton, the top section, has been pedestrianised for a significant number of years. Recently we have received reports of an increased amount of traffic, with suggestions that some drivers are not permitted to use this section of road. We will be showing an increased presence on this section of road and any driver caught contravening the traffic order will be subject of a fixed penalty notice, resulting in a non- endorsable fine of £50.
Anti-social behaviour
Making Communities Safer is a nationally-run campaign with the aim of bringing communities and organisations together take a stand against anti-social behaviour (ASB), in order to make communities safer.
During ASB awareness week, and due to recent ASB in Sturminster Newton, the neighbourhood Policing Team PCSO Mandy Robinson and PC Phil Sugrue invited district councillor Carole Jones and town councillor Debbie Mantock to join them in ASB preventative foot patrols in Sturminster Newton.
This was an opportunity for working with our partners and to engage, jointly, with the young people who meet up in the town. We patrolled the Railway Gardens, the town area, Butts Pond, Rixon Rec and Ricketts Lane Rec (also known as the Town Rec). Only two groups were seen and spoken to during the evening.
Banking scam
Recently a local residence was contacted by phone by a male purporting to be from Barclays Bank. The caller stated that there had been fraudulent activity on the bank account and that it was necessary to move the money to a ‘safe’ account. The caller then shared bank details for this safe transfer account.
The intended victim was told to attend the bank and to phone the caller – the scammer – when they arrived, and to keep the phone line open. Fortunately, the bank realised this was a scam and no monies were lost.
DO NOT ENGAGE WITH FRAUDSTERS AND HANG UP!
Please be on your guard and report suspicious activity to the police either by calling 101 or via the police website www.dorset.police.uk/
If a crime is occurring or a life is in danger, always call 999.
The heat is on, on the … fields?
The dry summer continues its impact on Dorset farmers as we move into autumn, says NFU county advisor Gemma Harvey
image: Laura Hitchcock
We all know by now that July 2022 was the driest July in England since 1911, and it has been the driest nine months (November 2021 to July 2022) since 1975/76. Met Office figures show that there has only been 24 per cent of the average rainfall for July.
The impact of this prolonged spell of dry weather is hugely challenging and causing concern for many agricultural and horticultural businesses across the country.
The dry weather is severely hampering grass growth. In Dorset, as with much of Britain, most livestock is grazed in a grass-based system, meaning that livestock eats grass from the fields in the summer, with farmers harvesting surplus grass to feed animals in the winter in the form of silage. The lack of grass this summer will inevitably hit feed supplies for the winter – many farmers are already having are already having to feed their livestock the forage reserved for winter to compensate for the lack of grass currently available.
For the county’s arable farmers, the dry weather has meant that harvest came early this year, with many having finished in time for the Gillingham and Shaftesbury show, which is somewhat unprecedented.
Fire risk still high
Attention now turns to the planting of winter crops; with the ground still cracked and parched, the establishment of crops such as winter cereals and oilseed rape will be difficult.
On top of all this, as I’m sure many will have seen and heard, the dry conditions are having widespread implications for fire-risk and farm safety. The county has experienced several fires over the past few weeks. This is devastating and dangerous for all those involved but is also a heartening example of how the farming community is able to pull together in times of need. Neighbouring farmers are making great use of WhatsApp to alert one another to fire risks, and coming to one another’s aid with tankers of water to help extinguish fires and cultivators to stop them spreading (see the story our news pages).
This does serve as an important reminder though, with weather conditions so dry and temperatures high, the fire risk remains high. With an increased number of people making the most of the weather and enjoying being out and about in the countryside, there has also been an increase in the use of disposable barbecues.
The NFU is reminding the public to be safe and responsible when out enjoying the countryside.
Sponsored by Trethowans – Law as it should be
Devil’s-bit scabious
Growing a wildflower meadow in your back garden isn’t quite as simple as you might think – but it’s important to try, says writer Jane Adams
About ten years ago, I decided to grow a mini wildflower meadow on what was a rather forlorn patch of grass. It was lumpy and weedy, and I could tell it really didn’t want to be a lawn. Actually, allowing it to grow seemed an obvious win. I wouldn’t have to mow it and pollinators like bees and butterflies would benefit from any extra flowers. From what I’d read, insects needed all the help they could get.
But I swiftly found out thet proper wildflower meadows are deceptively hard to grow.
In that first year I planted chamomile, knapweed, orange hawkbit, bird’s-foot-trefoil, yellow rattle, and devil’s-bit scabious plug-plants to boost the diversity of plant life. My old lawn buzzed and crawled with insect life, and I felt pretty smug.
The following year hardly anything grew except the devil’s-bit scabious.
I know now what I did wrong. I didn’t research what wildflowers would and should grow in my sandy Dorset patch. I hadn’t considered the rich mosaic of interconnected plants and fungi that were needed to make a lowland meadow – even one as small as mine. In short, I thought copying nature would be simple, and it wasn’t.
Image: Jane Adams
A few fragments
In the UK we’ve lost a staggering 97 per cent of our species-rich grassland since the 1930s. That’s equivalent to 7.5 million acres; and quite a few of those acres would have been in Dorset.
Over the years meadows were mismanaged, undervalued, and unprotected. What took hundreds, even thousands, of years to grow disappeared almost overnight.
But we do still have fragments of flower-rich meadows in our countryside. We just need to join them up so that wildlife can flow from one to another. Which is why conservationists are keen for us to create green corridors for wildlife and plants by growing wildflowers in our gardens. Just imagine if we could sew a giant living patchwork of native flowers right across Dorset.
In the meantime, the devil’s-bit scabious, and the bees that hang from their button blooms, are a joy to watch on my old lawn. And they are a reminder we can all do our bit to help wildlife during this ecological crisis.
Ploughing a new furrow
Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Marine Awareness Officer Julie Hatcher shares the story of work to monitor the recently arrived furrowed crab.
The wildlife-rich shallows and seashore of Kimmeridge Bay were designated as a protected area under UK law in 2019 and form part of the Purbeck Coast Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ). The intertidal zone (the region between the high tide mark and the low tide mark) in Kimmeridge Bay is the only stretch with this level of protection along the open Dorset coast and an important part of our work at the Wild Seas Centre is to record and monitor the marine life along this coastline.
Image © VFogarty
Migrant crabs
One such survey focuses on the furrowed crab, Xantho hydrophilus, a native to the south west coast but a recent arrival in Dorset.
Further west, this crab has undergone a population explosion in recent decades, raising concerns about its impact on other long-term residents. First sighted on the seashore at Kimmeridge in 2019, the survey records the population size and any concurrent changes to other crab species on the seashore, including the edible crab, Cancer pagurus, of which there is an abundance of juveniles. Edible crabs move to progressively deeper water as they grow, so the ones found intertidally are the small, immature youngsters.
A team of trained volunteers records the number, size and sex of crabs, along with the habitat
and associated animals. While the population of furrowed crabs is still at a low level, something interesting has been discovered about the edible crabs; out of the 125 recorded, only four were females. Crab experts appear to have no explanation for this gender discrepancy and
further research is needed to solve the mystery.
The need to monitor
Climate change is known to be altering the distribution and survivability of many wildlife species and it is thought that the furrowed crab may be one of these, hence its recent colonisation in Dorset. The effects of shifting distributions and the fortunes of both winners and losers in these changing times are unforeseeable, so monitoring changes and their impacts is vital to our understanding of how we can help.
Of course, the most urgent need is to slow the global temperature increase, which will at least give species more time to adapt. Meanwhile our volunteers will continue to monitor this most difficult of ecosystems and share our understanding far and wide.
Flower farming in a drought
The dry summer has been difficult, says flower farmer Charlotte Tombs as she makes plans to work around drought with her 2023 plant choices
Images: Charlotte Tombs
I won’t bore you with how I was going to have natural free spring water for my flower beds this summer. Nor how I was going to have irrigation in all the beds. Or how (like always) the plumber never came when he said he would, and has only just turned up some eight weeks later – which is rather late. Or even how I’ve spent hours watering and keeping things alive this summer and I’m never going to get those hours back.
In fact I just had to give up on some beds and as a consequence had to cut down on the flower orders I’ve been able to take on.
But of course there is always next year to do things differently; with different plants and different varieties. The great thing about gardening, as I’ve written before, is you always get another season to try again.
Climate change plants
Perennials are the way forward if our summers are getting hotter and our climate is changing – I will certainly be looking to grow more drought-tolerant plants myself. Of course they are more expensive, but they can be grown from seed and some will flower in their first year. Good choices for this are achillea, yarrow and eryngium, or sea holly, which is the most beautiful steely blue colour and the bees LOVE it so it’s a real winner for the garden.
It’s a good idea right now to take the time and have a good look around your garden; see what has survived and thrived in your poor parched flower beds.
Drought-tolerant plants tend to have grey or silver leaves – the light-coloured leaves reflect the sun’s rays. Often the leaves also have tiny grey hairs on them, which help to retain moisture around the plant’s sensitive tissues. Some plants which really don’t mind a drought are echinacea (or coneflower), nepeta (or catmint; be warned, cats really do love this plant!), agastanche, salvias, lavender and rosemary. A lot of ornamental grasses thrive in dry conditions, unlike their moisture-loving cousin otherwise known as your lawn.
The zinnias this summer have been amazing; they love it hot and dry. They are considered a ‘dirty flower’ because they make the vase water dirty, but a small drop of bleach will help prevent this.
There is an autumnal nip in the air first thing now, and thankfully a heavy dew which is helping my thirsty flowers. It’s certainly been a challenging summer for a cut flower grower.
