We’ve just had the international climate conference COP16, concentrating on biodiversity, and we’re heading into November’s COP29, focusing on the world’s commitment to reducing the use of fossil fuels, curbing methane, and ensuring we’re planning, funding and enacting global resilience to climate change.

The discussions often seem far removed from our individual lives and the pace of change glacial (a poignant adjective, some might say!). Yet Greening Wymondham, like so many organisations, is full of people working hard on the ground to make changes.

Take Apple Day – hosted with Sustainable Wymondham at the recent Farmers’ Market – which was a great success. Not only did it feature fresh-pressed juice from local orchards, but apple varieties. It also highlighted the problems with pesticides especially when they combine to form a dangerous cocktail.

And we’re now in our fourth year of giving small trees to Year 6 Wymondham students to plant – around 200 this year to pupils at Robert Kett’s, Browick Road and Ashleigh Schools. That makes 800 trees in total – helping absorb carbon as they mature.

“The trees go out with planting and growing instructions,” says GW member Mike Heard, “and we hope to hear how some of them are doing – and photos of those trees and their growers now or next year would be great!

“Excess or unwanted trees go back to the schools or to us to find a good home.”

Litter picking, which we also did in October, is another contribution we can all make – not just to render Wymondham more attractive but to prevent harm to animals through, for example, plastic bags. It also stops our gutters clogging up with detritus and then flooding. We welcomed two new volunteers – Ben and Arthur Alemao – who did a brilliant job in Browick Park.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at our volunteer workdays in Browick Park Community Orchard and Friarscroft Wood – and we’ll have more news on both of those, and the river testing, next month. In the meantime, check us out on Instagram and Facebook – and email any ideas, queries or comments to greeningwymondham@gmail.com.