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.