Final 'topping off' for the year

Using a ride on mower on the highest setting (5 - 10 cm from the ground) I have done (probably) the last 'topping off' for the year. Keeping the length of the grass down allows light to get through to the little wildflower seedings that are growing in the bare patches of earth created by the harrowing earlier in the summer.

I try and avoid cutting some of the 'adult' plants (such as meadow cranesbill) so the field has a rather lumpy look to it, but I think that having the autumn leaves as an extra bit of growth on these plants gives them some additional energy stores down in the roots for next year.

It has been such a warm autumn that the grass is growing well at least 3 weeks later than usual, so I guess that the 'topping off' is especially important this year.

Bulb planting in full swing

A little late in the year, but I am about half way through bulb planting. The ground in the wood is extraordinarily dry so I am worried that the bulbs will not do well, but I don't have much choice as I am away on holiday and will not be back until it is too late to plant bulbs. In the wood I am planting 500 bluebells, 100 Wood Anenome and 100 Wild garlic. In the field I am putting 500 Snake's Head Fritillary (all bulbs were from Meadowmania http://www.meadowmania.co.uk).

Bulbs have arrived - time for planting!

The dry and warm autumn means that there are still bees and insects around. However they will soon need a place to hibernate, so as well as the 'bug hotels' made from the plastic tree protectors (see post of 24/4/2016) I have also constructed 'hibernation heaps'. These are piles of branches that are then covered with a thick layer of grass and bramble cuttings.

The structure is open at one side, created by putting the butt ends of the branches in the same direction and not covering this with grass. This means that there is some air movement and the grass will stay dry and not just compost, remaining  good place to hide away through the winter.

End of the Planting Season

The last few weeks have concentrated on planting out all of the pots that I have been growing over the summer. Ideally this would have been done by the end of September - with planting out in the wildflower meadow being done just after cutting to give the plants a chance to establish themselves without too much competition from the grass. However I am much later than this work gets in the way of planting wildflowers! Still I have planted out about 50 pots over the last 4 weeks.

Planting has been mainly cowslip, common agrimony, meadow cranesbill and valerian.  I am now hoping for a good few days of wet and warm weather before the frosts set in in order for the new plantings to put down some roots. I have ben 'topping off' the grass in the part of the meadow where the grass is getting quite coarse to try and keep the coarse grass down and let the finer grasses and wild flowers come through a bit more.

About 3 weeks ago I also scattered oxeye daisy, wild carrot, yellow rattle, red clover and feverfew seeds on areas of the meadow where there was still bare earth. Bulb planting next - they are on order and I hope will arrive soon so that we can get them into the ground in the next couple of weeks.

Raking out the bottom of the hedges

A task taking a couple of days at this time of year is to rake the grass out of the hedge bottoms. I am trying to encourage the wildflowers such a red campion and garlic-mustard to grow, so I used roundup about 6 weeks ago to create bare patches at the bottom of the hedges around the wildflower meadow, and along the woodland paths. I have now used the front bar cutting mower to cut right up to the hedge - and then with a hay rake have moved away the long dead grass to expose the new wildflowers coming through below.

This makes a huge difference to the amount of light getting into the hedge bottom, and I hope that with a few weeks left before the frosts start this will give the flowers a real chance to get going. The two pictures below are a before and after of the same piece of hedge. Look at how lots of small green plants (red campion) are revealed when the long dry grass is raked away.

All of the grass cuttings then need to be pitchforked up to the grass heap, so it is a job that takes a couple of days.

I haven't noticed the swallows around for about 2 weeks now, so nature is telling me to get on with the autumn planting and cutting jobs.

What a difference a harrowing makes.

The wildflower meadow has now been harrowed - so there are lots of bare patches of earth. This picture is taken in exactly the same area that I photographed the dense dead grass thatch (see post on 15th September). It now looks very different.

There are the green shoots of new seedlings growing in the patches of earth, so even under the dead grass 'thatch' the seeds were germinating. Time now to get scattering the seeds that I collected a couple of months ago. I want to increase the amount of hay rattle in the upper part of the meadow where the grass is still quite coarse. I am also going to 'top off' this area in the late autumn in order to help keep the courses grasses under control. I guess that it is all about achieving a balance - many years ago autumn grazing by cattle would have achieved the same effect.

The downside of harrowing is that all of the scrapings have to be dealt with. The farmer helpfully leaves them all in the same place - but then it is a hay rake and pitchfork job to move them into a grass heap (if left where they are it would just become a patch of nettles and docks in the field due to the high nutrient area that they would create).

Who is making the trail?

I saw this well marked trail leading from a cut path then going under a hedge and it made me wonder who had made it.

We have foxes, muntjac deer and badgers who could have been responsible, so I set up a motion detection camera to find out.

The first night revealed who had been treading this path!

Field and grass cutting

The field has been cut - much later than I have done this before so it will be interesting to see the results.

It has not been harrowed so there is still a dense thatch that is preventing the light getting to the seeds on the ground.

It will be harrowed soon, so this will let the light in and get the seeds to germinate.

The late summer cut is also underway - I am doing this for some of the borders and hedge bottoms to grow the later flowering summer plants that will not survive the earlier cut is in the spring meadow.

This labour intensive, as it needs to be done by front bar mower, hay rake and scythe.

I found a strange hole in the grass that looked like a bowl with a hole in the earth underneath it. This looked very strange so I moved the grass with a pitch fork - the ran as fast as I could when I saw the number of wasps flying in and out!

Winning against the docks!

As the wildflower meadow is due to be cut early next week (several days of good weather are forecast for haymaking) I have been going round and cutting the seed heads off from all of the docks that survived my Roundup Gel earlier in the year. There are so many fewer this year, so a job that in the past has taken two days only took me an hour.

It is very satisfying to see how many dock seeds I am preventing from hitting the ground - I often think that one dock head is like a packet of seeds! As I have been doing this for nearly 10 years just think of the number of seeds that are now not in the meadow.

The early summer flowering plants have now set seed so it is really time for the hay to be cut.

This year I am going to 'top off' the meadow a couple of times during the late summer and autumn to try and reduce some of the coarser grass which is taking over in part of the field.

Is the Little Owl in residence?

Coming home at twilight a little owl fledgling was sitting in the road about 20 meters away from a tree where I have put up a little owl box. The bird sat in the road then flapped up into a nearby tree. When I put the box up 5 years ago it looked like a good place - a big horizontal branch for the chicks to site out on and tucked away in the ivy near the main trunk of an oak. I thought that it was empty, but I will be keeping a close eye out for 'branching' chicks from now on - and I will make an expedition today to look for pellets under the box.

The little owl box has a 'turn' in it as they like to be hidden away without a direct visual line to the box entrance. The pictures below are of another little owl box which I had a camera in - unfortunately the whole branch that this one was on fell down and I haven't put this second little owl box back up yet - another job for the autumn.

Collecting the Rattle seed

Top job at this time of year is collecting the seed from the Hay Rattle before the Wildflower Meadow is cut next week. There is a relatively brief window of two or three weeks between the seed ripening and the grass being cut for hay. The old country saying is that the hay should be harvested when the Hay Rattle rattles - the sounds the seeds make in the dried seed-heads.
Rattle is a vital component of the Wildflower meadow as it is semi-parasitic on grass and keeps the vigour of the grass down allowing the wild flowers to come through. In the upper half of the Meadow the grass is long and quite course, with very little Rattle so I need to spread seed in theses areas, as well as do an autumn 'topping off' of the grass. The Rattle seed is expensive, so harvesting our own is time well spent.

The seed is collected by looking for a newly ripened seed head, holding on to the stalk below and pulling up to remove the seed pods. If you don't hold on to the stalk with one hand while harvesting with the other you will uproot the whole plant. The seeds are collected in a plastic container, and then emptied into a cardboard box so that they dry out and all the seeds are released.
I have scattered them on earth areas in the winter in previous years, but I have noticed that lots don't get to the ground - so this year I am going to scatter the seed straight after harrowing in August.

Ragwort Pulling

I have mixed feelings about pulling up the Ragwort - my neighbours certainly would not thank me for leaving it as windblown seeds pay no respect to the boundaries of the Woodland and Wildflower Meadow. However, I really like seeing the Cinnabar moth caterpillars with their bright orange and black "warning I taste bad" stripes.

Quite a lot of Ragworth has moved into the Meadow this year from an uncultivated strip on a nearby field. It needs to be pulled up by the roots to remove it - so I spent a sweaty couple of hours tugging at the plants. The result was a field clear of ragwort - and there are several places nearby with plenty growing, so the Cinnabar Month will still have a home.

The best reward for hard labour of ragwort pulling was finding this Marsh Thistle growing in the damp area at the bottom the field - a new plant for the Meadow which I hope might get established.

A battle with the Docks

As with all horse grazed fields we had a lot of dock growing in the beginning. Each year in the spring I have been spraying them with Roundup, and then at this time of year cutting off the seed heads. There are many fewer this year that cutting the seed heads only took two hours (previously it has taken up to two days!).

This year I have also discovered Roundup Gel - the trouble with the spray is that it killed a section of other plants around the dock and left a bare patch where - more docks grew! The gel is selective and seems to work very well.

Next task is pulling the Ragwort.

Grass Cutting among the trees - my least favourite job of the summer

A weekend of grass cutting around a shelter belt of trees to the north of the Meadow which was planted 5 years ago. I have left cutting rather late in the year so there is really thick, rank grass growing which has really smothered the row of holly.

I have tried some 'natural engineering' using 4 rows of trees to create a wedge shape to take the north wind up and over the house - the furthest north two is holly (low and slow growing) then mixed blackthorn, hawthorn, crab apple, then two rows of tall and quick growing birch with some climax vegetation trees mixed in (oak and beech) to take a very long term view. This creates a wedge - although I think that the wedge is really too narrow to have much of an effect.

Cutting the grass between these trees is a horrible job as the ground in uneven, the vegetation coarse and the are hundreds of horse flies living in it which swarm out so whole body protection is required - which is so hot to wear in the sunshine. It used to take me 2 days to do the cutting, but investment in an Allen Scythe, or front-bar cutting mower (known in the USA as a motorised sickle),  has decreased this to about 4 hours!

The mower is from AT-KO and was a bit of a pain to assemble - but it has transformed my ability to cut grass. Definitely a good investment.

As you can see from the photos above there is still a lot of grass around the holly which will need to be removed buy hand - 5 minutes per tree multiplied by 60 trees. Looks like another day of work before I finish completely. Four of five of the Hollies have died so I will need to replant in the autumn.

Digging a bumble bee nest

I was initially puzzled by a 10 inch deep hole with a mass of bumble bees at the bottom. There was newly dug earth around, and I realised that this was the overnight work of a badger digging out a communal bumble bee nest to eat the larvae.

Lots of path  clearance at the moment as the grass and hogweed is falling over in the regular thunderstorms that we are still having. However the Meadow Cranesbill seems to stay upright and there is a lovely display of blue flowers.

Transplanting Cowslips

Last autumn I tried planting cowslip seed in individual little cells, but only about 30% has germinated. I have had much better germination rates planting the seeds in the summer.

However, those that have grown now need potting on into larger pots, ready to plant out after the grass has been cut if there is some damp weather forecast for a few days. If not they will go into the ground in late September.

Cowslips potted on

We also have 4 or 5 new arrivals with very cute punk hairstyles:

Few Ox-eye Daisys

Where have all the Dog Daisys gone? I have alway struggled to get them to grow, and this year is the worst show yet. Driving around I see a huge number growing on the roadside, so I know that the climate here is good for them. Maybe my field is still too fertile, or maybe I am cutting the field a bit too late (usually the second week of August when the Cranesbill has set seed). Maybe this year I should cut it a week or two earlier.

Talking of the Meadow Cranesbill - this is just going into flower. It is doing much better in the places where I planted 4 or 5 plants together in a patch as this seems to shade out the grass. Places where there is just a single plant seem to be much more of a struggle among the long grass.

Two weeks ago i did some spot treatment with Roundup Gel on docks - this seems to have worked well as the docks have turned yellow - and I haven't got that ring of dead grass that happens when a spray rather than a gel is used. So the gel may be a bit more expensive, but I am impressed with it efficiency.

Catching up with planting - too late

I have been planting out (about 6 weeks too late!) Great Burnet. I saw a single plant of this in flower in a nearby field last year so it is probably natural to this area. These plants came as plugs in January and have been potted on - but should have been planted out earlier as there is now only about 6 weeks growing time before the field is cut. However they seem unhappy in the pots so I thought it better to plant them out now rather than keep them for planting after the hay cut.

Great Burnet (Sanguisorba officials) ready to plant

I had put roundup in some small patches across the meadow earlier in the year, so i am hoping that they will be able to grow well without the competition from established grass.

Elsewhere in the meadow things are growing well, with Field Buttercup and Ragged Robin giving a good show of colour.

Field Buttercup

The cuckoo flower is just about over. Ten years ago there were only 7 or 8 heads of cuckoo flower, but with the right cutting regime this has increased every year. Last year there were about 50. This year for the first time there were just too many to count - more than a hundred I would guess.

Transplanting Lords and Ladies failed

So I asked the question of whether the transplanted Wild Arum would survive - the answer is "no". I think that I dug them up from a very stony area so didn't get enough of the roots, so I also may have planted them too deep to try and compensate. Still nothing lost, as I had to dig them up anyway.
I will try planting some of the seeds on the woodland edge a bit later in the summer to try and get this plant to move out of the hedge bottoms and into the dense patches of scrub on the woodland edges.

Bug hotel under construction

I had been wondering if there was a better way to use the 'green tubes' that have been protecting the saplings. The trees are now big enough to have them removed and I had been taking them to the tip with a bad conscience. However, visiting the national forest recently I saw them stacked in the undergrowth - presumably to provide a shelter for bugs and small animals. A great idea and SO much better than landfill. My version is under construction:

I have used a couple of old posts and some scrap wood to make the 'backboard'. The one in the national forest did not have this, but I think that it gives much better shelter. I have cut the tubes in half and pushed 4 halves inside each other to give a central hole with lots of snug spaces between the surfaces. Recycled tree stakes hold the tubes in place.
I plan to make it about three time the present height and then cover with brushwood (again my own variation on the national forest version). More photos to follow as the project progresses.

Adding variety to an old hedge

After many years of horse grazing this area of hedge next to the new woodland had very little variety of wild flowers. Late last summer I sprayed some areas at the bottom of the hedge with Roundup to get rid of patches of grass. Into these patches I scattered seeds of Red Campion and Jack-by-the-Hedge. The results are just becoming visible with good growth a Campion.

As the Jack-by-the-Hedge (Garlic Mustard) takes two years to flower I will have to wait a bit to see if they grow, but elsewhere they have easily grown from scattered seed.

A theme of what I am trying to do with this land is to encourage flower and tree diversity to provide as many different ecological niches as possible to offer habitats for a variety of wildlife. So putting back the flower rich hedge bottoms is an important part of the overall plan.

Can Wild Arum be transplanted?

There was a patch of wild arum self-seeded into the chicken orchard, so I dug it up as I was worried that the berries might be poisonous to chickens. There is a lot of this planet in the hedge bases, but the new woodland does not have any (as a child I usually called wild arum "lords-and-ladies", not knowing that this was a rather crude medieval  joke based on the male and female flower shapes).

The bottom of the stem has a type of corm - with fleshy roots that break very easily. I planted them in dark shade in very wet areas of the woodland hoping that the wetness of the soil would compensate for so many roots being broken off.

The one clump gave rise to about 20 separate plants.

First spring flowers

First flowering of cowslip today. These were grown from seed in individual plug pots and planted out in the autumn. The seed needs to be sown as soon as it is ripe in the summer in order for the plug plants to get big enough to withstand the winter. I keep a few each year in pots which then produce the seed for the next year's plants. Slowly I am spreading them across the meadow.

The first leaves of the Comfrey are sprouting. I grew these from cuttings - just a leaf taken with the join to the stem or a shooting tip, which I put in a small jar of water for a couple of weeks until the first small roots had grown, the planted into a pot. This worked to some extent, but I had more success with planting the cuttings straight into a pot and putting it in standing water for a couple of weeks. I guess that this allowed the roots to grow without the disturbance of planting out.

Each year the old leaves die down and fall flat on the ground forming a dense ring around the planet which prevents anything else growing in competition. An excellent way of getting rid of the opposition in a rough grassland.

Also today the Selfheal is out in flower for the first time. Small Tortoiseshell butterflies were already fighting over territory - the first butterflies seen this spring.

Marsh Marigolds in flower

The Marsh Marigolds have been in full flower for a couple of weeks now. Today in some early spring sunshine the first bumblebees were buzzing around them. I also saw the bees high in the Goat Willow branches where there are some large catkins. I did not know that catkins had any nectar as I thought that they were wind pollinated. Will have to look this up and report back.

The Marsh Marigolds are very easy to propagate - just cut up the root ball with a spade after flowering. I usually split each into about 3 pieces, and put each part into the mud. All seem to grow very well.
I think that there are a small number of plants that have seeded, but they do not seem to set seed easily, so the physical division is much better. This will not give any genetic diversity so I guess that an import every 10 years or so would be a good idea.

Butterfly trees in bud

Back at the end of January I planted 10 Alder Buckthorn trees, which are now in bud. This is the food plant for the caterpillars of the Brimstone butterfly, and I have planted them in a sheltered south facing place, which I hope will be ideal.

I haven't seen Brimstones in the local area, but I saw a sighting on a notice board in a National Forest area about 2 miles away last summer. So another interesting experiment - my experience so far is that if you create the right environment nature will just move in.

Wildflower plugs to plant

The meadow is nicely stabilised as it is now 10 years old, but I am still gradually increasing the diversity of flowers - and am trying to work out the best planting schedule for different species.

I saw some Great Burnet growing wild in a nearby field last summer, which spurred me on to buy some plants. Today have planted out some plug plants (bought from the Trust for Conservation Volunteers, who have just closed their online shop) into pots. These will be planted into the meadow and surrounds in a few weeks time. I will be spraying small areas with Roundup to give somewhere for them to grow - but as  it is windy and there are showers coming through will have to wait for a dry and still day to do the spraying. Plantings have been:

To go in the boggy areas of long grass at the bottom of the meadow.

Hemp Agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum) - 

To go in the wood:

Wild Primrose (Primula vulgaris)

Wood Avens (Geum urban)

To go in the field:

Wild Carrot (Daucus carota)

Common Valerian (Valeriana officinalis)

Great Burnet (Sanguisorba officials)
Meadow Clary (Salvia pratensis)

To go on the edges of a stony area:

Red Valerian (Centrranthus ruber)

The ground is too waterlogged to plant these out a present so I will grow them on a bit in pots (the mesh on top is to stop the chickens digging them up).

Planted in the green

Planted bluebells in the green today, bought from the TCV shop, but I see that this closed for business on 7th March - so will have to find an alternative supplier next time.

Also planted Lesser Celandine in the green, but then felt very daft for buying them as there is a profusion of lesser celandine growing along the stream. Will also try transplanting some of them into a damp area of the new woodland next weekend.

Planted rhizomes of wood anemone fairly far apart (about a foot or so, as I think that these spread quite well).

There is good evidence of fresh Muntjac deer hoof prints, so around all of this new planting and the area that has the wild garlic I put a chicken wire fence, using some old wire from the orchard. This is less than a metre high and so will not stop a determined deer, and is also not dug in at the bottom so will not stop a badger. However it might just be some deterrent, so was worth a bit of time erecting.