Random Observations
Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2021 12:37 am
In the hope that you will also share yours..
(from personal amateur experience.)
It would be easier, and can save heart ache and hours of labour or boring tractor driving, to practice meadow management on small spaces first. Don't bite off far more than...
Borrowing grazing animals for short periods might be ideal, but is difficult to achieve in reality.
If the land is fenced, it offers many more options for management, over different years. It's relatively expensive, but, once done, it should last at least 10 years, probably far longer. The chemicals for preserving fencing posts and stakes aren't as strong as they used to be, so the timber doesn't last as long as it used to.
Grazing animals can pull out the thatch more than machines, though a flail mower collector does a clean job. Grazing animals vastly reduce the work of cutting and collecting mechanically, though both will probably still be needed. A flail mower collector will find out every lump and bump in a field. Before flattening every bump, consider, is it an ancient hedgeline, part of the history of the landscape?
Thinking of buying grazing animals - one of the first questions, is - where will they live for the winter?
If you have devil's bit scabious, don't let sheep in, or at least - ration them carefully, they love devil's bit scabious, and will graze it down hard, reducing the flowering and possibly even killing it off.
Machinery is expensive to buy and maintain, but saves hours of manual labour. A thought for office workers who might be unaccustomed to manual labour.
Teeny weeny machines with small cutting widths seem to take forever to cover any space.
Widening a gate, so that a contractor can access the land can be well worth while.
Strimming - can be used to cut the sward at different heights. (Be your own cow.) Cutting at half height first - may mean double the swish, but it gives relative peace of mind if you can check for hedgehogs, frogs, etc, first, before cutting very short. A quicker and better alternative might be to ask a dog to sniff through the long grass tussocks and the flattened soft rush, before you go near there with a strimmer. This also give you time to notice and rescue any caterpillars on the top leaves, and to rescue any particularly precious remaining seedheads.
Clearing cut grass - long grass or rush - long tines, a fork is best, short grass - short tines, a rake is better. It's well worth seeking out lightweight comfortable tools which fit the individual human frame, and can make a job a lot more pleasant, and save energy which means more gets done. Second hand tools can often be sharpened and are sometimes more lightweight than modern ones.
A battery operated strimmer can free one up from waiting for someone else to bring on their machinery. They can be relatively very light, take an hour to charge, and last about 10-20 mins. That's enough to make a job bite-sized. It can take 3-4 times as long to clear up the grass. So that's a good way of setting a limit. Doing a small amount completely, cut and cleared, on one occasion, using different muscles, and lessening the chance of walking like a neanderthal that evening. Or, you could just buy 2 batteries. 2 lightweight batteries may well be preferable to one heavy weight one.
A wheeled petrol-driven strimmer is unlikely to cope well with rough ground. Either the wheels or the nose gets stuck in a dip or rut, and then the machine needs to be manhandled free. It may also turn the long vegetation into mush which is more awkward to pick up by fork or rake, than the longer swathes left by an ordinary strimmer.
Pay for a contractor or buy your own machinery and do it yourself? If you have wide gates, largish areas without tight corners, few obstacles such as trees, and are short of time, then a contractor may save you hours and hours of time. It is unbelievably tedious to trundle up and down several acres' worth of fields with small-width machinery. On the plus side, if you diy, you may choose to cut in strips as and when you choose, avoid cutting certain areas or plants at certain times of year, and may wiggle around as you choose. A contractor will come when he wants, and few will want to be bothered with small tight areas, and he'll cut the whole lot at once, he'll probably not want to leave that precious small area that you want to save for later.
If you save the cuttings for your garden compost - that gives more flexibility of timing for the cut; you can cut in Sept or October, promoting your late flowers such as fleabane, betony and devil's bit scabious, rather than if you have to wait for that good weather and peak of ripeness in June for a hay cut which is when the contractor is particularly busy. The downside of cutting later, is that the grass may be longer (if you haven't cut or grazed in early summer,) and the grass and rush may be lying flat and is thence more difficult to cut. The grass will also be wetter, and the ground will be wetter and more prone to compaction.
It's worth cutting some particular areas early, in late spring/early summer, such as grassy areas with late flowering plants such as betony, sneezewort, marsh woundwort and devil's bit scabious, or areas of sharp rush with fleabane and loose strife, as otherwise these flowers can be utterly swamped at their flowering time by long grass or rush which has been left uncut all year. Cutting some strips and recording the time of year, (eg by a photo), will help one assess the best time to cut for that particular site and that particular plant, eg perhaps early June for betony and marsh woundwort.
Cutting sharp and soft rush in early-mid summer may prevent it from flowering and seeding, and falling smotheringly flat, later in Sept/Oct, but this has to be weighed up with the risk of involuntarily cutting unripe orchid or marsh valerian seed heads, or emerging loose strife which also grow within the rush. Cutting in sections is probably the answer, cut some, save some. Cut different sections next year.
Long swathes of cut soft rush is useful to place on top of muddy paths in the winter. I use mine around poultry houses, especially where water fowl dibble. Being water resistant, the rush sits on top of the mud, but is broken down and absorbed by the summer. A useful and free alternative to wood chippings.
Leaving an area of uncut grass and flower stems over winter is said to provide homes for many invertebrates. Seed heads will open and seeds fall at the natural time, and food on the ground and on standing stems may remain available for the wildlife. Wrens and sparrows may often be seen foraging in amongst the grass tussocks.
DWT advised me to cut standing stems at the end of winter, just before spring when everything, plants and invertebrates, wakes up and starts moving. However, the grass stems flatten in the autumn, and by the end of winter there may be a thick solid thatch covering the soil, which blocks light and prevents new seeds or delicate plants from pushing through. One could harrow, or hand rake the flattened grass stems to raise them up and then cut them in late February, but the hand raking is jolly hard work, so perhaps think very carefully about the location, extent, and permanency/rotation of the grassy areas left standing over winter. (If people have a high proportion of flower stems to grass stems in their meadow, then perhaps they don't have this problem.)
If canary grass, wood club-rush and fleabane stems are left standing all winter, the stems are rotting by the end of winter and are relatively easy to pull out. The wood club-rush leaves will flatten and will rot down by mid winter, and it is probably best removed in part then, before the frogs are massing and using it for cover at spawning time.
If moor grass tussocks are burned at the end of the winter, (as advised to me by DWT - apparently it makes the grass more palatable), the dead thatch is removed, and, the most beautiful, waving, fountain of fresh green leaves delights the eye throughout the summer (if the green fountain is not nibbled to half height by animals). I used a gas torch.
Purple loose strife - starts growing up to 2 months earlier and bulks up much much bigger if it grows as a marginal on the edge of a pond with its roots actually in the water, compared with loose strife growing on damp ground out of water (this observation was of multiple clones of the same age = cuttings).
Loose strife doesn't appear above ground until very late, sometimes late May, sometimes even around the end of June in N Devon. Lookalike earlier leaves usually belong to ragged robin.
Giving loosestrife the 'Chelsea chop' i.e. chopping the stems down by 1/3 or a half in late June or whenever it is growing vigorously, will delay flowering and can increase the number of flowering stems. Cut half the plant, and the first half will flower sooner, followed later by the second half, extending the flowering season. If the loosestrife is growing in or next to water, just let the cut stems fall into the water, and leave them there. A couple of months later the cut stems will be producing roots and can be planted in the autumn, or left to die down for the winter in a bucket partially filled with water a couple of cm deep, until they wake up the following year.
Loosestrife is fantastic for bees and very showy. Plant some where the deer can't reach the flower heads.
If ragged robin is growing in the bottom of permanently wet ditch, it is very easy to pull apart the rosettes in the early part of the year and replant them in another wet area, where they will gallop away. Ditto, brooklime, water mint, meadow sweet, fleabane in May, anything really which spreads by rhizomes or running stems.
Devil's bit scabious and betony can produce plants with white flowers. Cuckoo flower comes in single and double forms. If you want to find out more about a plant, google its common name and doublecheck the images to find its latin name, then you'll find much more information and studies if you search with the latin name.
Marsh ragwort and thistles have the earliest flowers turning to seed whilst on the same head, new buds are forming and flowers are opening. (My conclusion - there's no point in trying to keep the flowers and then to deadhead to prevent seeding, it's one or the other..)
Creeping thistle flowerheads and coarse grass flower heads can ripen into seed if left on the ground after cutting, so there's no point in topping/deadheading or pulling them unless you clear them up within a day or so.
Nettle stems and roots, creeping and marsh thistle stems (-before the smallest hint of any buds are formed) and roots, and bindweed can be left to dry out and won't rejuvenate.
It is a Lot Less work to dig out spear thistles and docks in their first winter of life, than to leave them to develop. Grappling with a flowering spear thistle is both tricky and painful, and leaving any of the flowers to develop can result in innumerable seeds floating off in the wind to cause a lot more work next year. Leaving any apparently spent spear thistle stems, can mean that more flower and seedheads develop before one passes by again.
New tiny peacock caterpillars are to be found at the very tip of a nettle in a web, and work their way down a little, before moving to other nettles. Contrary to popular recommendations, butterflies will often lay on small isolated nettle plants.
If deadheaded early, with roots left in the ground, docks and thistles develop multiple replacement flowerheads.
Docks can have very wide branching roots, far far wider than the leaf canopy in spring, and sometimes the roots are all to one side, perhaps if they have met a stone. This is worth remembering so that one may first dig at a greater distance from the leaves than might be apparently needed, to lessen the risk of slicing through or breaking the roots, and the chance of the root remnants regrowing next year. Docks sprayed in the previous year, may regenerate the next, with a new root forming alongside a blackened one. If a single dock or creeping thistle is seen in grassland, there are likely to be others lurking nearby.
(A fear lurks - that docks are undergoing a process of reevaluation, similarly to the reestablishment of yellow rattle, (ha!), and the general wisdom may one day be changed, to advise their retention - so all those efforts of digging out might, in the future, be deemed unnecessary - but for now..the thing is, if they are left, there remains the annual continual task of deadheading, so digging out is, to my mind, the lesser task.)
If knapweed has its spent flowers deadheaded before seed is formed, it does not, unlike many garden flowers, produce a fresh flush of blooms. However, cutting back some of one's knapweed plants in June, just as the first flower stems and buds form, (or allowing a few grazing animals in to trample/graze some,) can delay their flowering until September/Oct - extending the season from the end of July for the uncut plants, to mid Sep-mid Oct for the June-cut plants, when there is not so much on offer for pollinators. The purple of knapweed seems to 'glow' in the duller light of September and is more remarkable in that month.
Hard seedheads of knapweed often contain insect larvae growing fat on the seeds. Knapweed seedheads with a little 'give' usually still retain their seeds. The lookalike seeds on opened knapweed seedheads are actually the old bracts. Leaving knapweed seedheads uncut, will attract flocks of goldfinches to eat the seeds from early autumn and into mid winter.
If hemlock water dropwort and meadowsweet are cut early, they don't regrow much if at all and do not flower that year.
------------(update: just found an article on meadow sweet - to precis -. If you want to encourage it, hope for wet weather and don't cut, if you find it is crowding out other species, cut it. https://www.floodplainmeadows.org.uk/si ... lished.pdf)
The leaves of a mature plant of knapweed will suppress grass for the width of the rosette. A clump of meadow sweet, left all summer to grow tall, flower and set seed, will shade out the grass beneath.
Colour themed wild flowers/common weeds can look good and save work in a border (eg yellow wild flowers in a hot border). Some wild flowers will grow in rich soil, though they may become lanky and flop in borders. Buttercups, wood avens, bitter vetch, greater birdsfoot trefoil, knapweed, yarrow, purple loose strife, can all look terrific in flower in a colour themed garden border.
A carpet of flowering ransoms can look terrific in a shady area (Caerhays woodland garden in Cornwall).
Meadow plants (weeds) in the garden border can be treated as 'spares' and replanted in the meadow in the bare soil left behind from digging up a dock, or sow seeds there, to beat the dock seeds in the race towards light.
It's a complete waste of time and money and hope, sowing seeds, if you can't control the grass in the following year. Get the grass reduced in vigour before sowing any seeds.
If regenerating the seed bank naturally rather than stripping and scarifying, it is Far Better to control the grass and sacrifice any flowers for the first few years, as the flower plant roots will remain and the plants will bulk up, even without flowering.
Bare patches in the autumn can be temptingly deceptive, grass roots can lurk underneath and overwhelm precious seedlings in the next spring.
If a new layer of acid clay subsoil is deposited, and left alone, the only colonisers for the first few years are creeping buttercup and ribwort plantain. However, if desired roadside verge and hedgerow seed has been sown there, nothing may seem to happen for 3 years, and then 'suddenly' the hedgerow plants appear - thinking of tares and vetches.
Marsh mallow seeds can be collected when ripe by putting some sort of tray equivalent underneath to catch them when they scatter out of the seed pods. In wet weather, some seeds germinate within the seed pod and can be easily transplanted and grown on.
Red campion and common figwort seeds germinate readily and are useful as a quick cover of bare earth to ward off unwanted weed seedlings. A tough mat of yarrow can be used in the same way.
Common figwort is worth encouraging as it attracts the eyecatching wasp lookalike, the figwort sawfly.
Forgot to sow yellow rattle in the autumn - or had too much grass then? It's worth a try, and sometimes this works, sometimes not, but the seed is said to not be viable after a year anyway - so try putting yellow rattle seeds in a fridge (not a freezer) in moist perlite or sand, in January. Leave for 6 weeks*. Sow in bare patches of earth, treading them or pressing them well in to the damp earth so as to try to disguise them from the birds and ensure contact with the damp soil. The treading-in is time consuming. If not pressed in, the seeds may germinate because they were moistened in the fridge, and then immediately dry out; one sees a pathetic litle dried and dead seed root.... (Rattle normally germinates before many other seeds, on bare soil, from late Feb/March depending on the weather. It needs grass plants growing nearby for its food.) It's a fiddly process to sow moist seeds, but may be worth doing for small areas. Check in good light on the next day, or after frost, to see if there are any seeds which have not been pressed down into the soil. ...... However ..... don't leave it forgotten in the fridge - it may well germinate in there. (If germinated seed is found in time, this then leads to a rush to sow the germinated seed outside, into what might be inclement weather (horrid for the human, the rattle probably doesn't mind) and cold wet soil. A recipe for probable disaster.)
If the rattle seed germinates in the fridge and remains forgotten, the whole lot of this expensive seed will die. (I've done it all.)
Putting a left over bag of mixed seeds in the fridge in moist perlite or sand, might work if done in early spring so the bare patches of soil are warm at the time of sowing, as long as one is able to control any competition from grass or other things.
No need for seeds - left alone, many wild flowers spread rapidly, vegetatively, eg fleabane, yarrow, betony, bugle, clover and selfheal, even if the flowers are topped.
It can be much much easier and far less work, to spread many wanted plants by division, when you have substantial plant parts to begin with and may put them straight into the ground in late winter, than by sowing seed into trays and growing on. Primroses are easy to multiply by pulling apart in late winter, and replanting.
Self heal is a great ground cover for borders and lawns and it's easy to pull rooted stems off and press them into a new area. Massed white clover on a lawn emits a heady scent equivalent to moorland heather on a sunny day.
Wild flower seedheads are easier to find on wide roads than on narrow isolated country lanes which are often cut hard back for visibility. Lay bys are often a good source for seedheads.
Autumn is a lovely time for scattering seedheads, if you have left them to mature and not cut earlier in the year. Pinging seedheads can be seriously addictive, especially the 'electric' jumping of the devil's bit scabious - just try to remain aware of what you are scattering. Is that tempting umbellifer seedhead really angelica or is it hogweed, or hemlock water dropwort? They all look alluring in their ripe seedhead state.
Marsh violet colonies may be lurking underneath the skirts of purple moor grass.
Brash piles, whether in shade or sun, produce brambles, and later, nettles. Blackbirds may nest in a brash pile. A crumbled log is a wonderful soil conditioner. Even just one decaying log may attract a greater spotted woodpecker to your garden.
When browsing, deer and ponies will tear off branches - no clean cuts and no apparent difference except in extent, to flailing. Deer love hogweed and elder, orchid seedheads and loosestrife flowers. Deer and electric fencing don't mix (or, I should say - deer invariably become entangled in the wire and break it, poor things). (Hedgehogs can become entangled in electric poultry netting. Grass snakes ditto in anti-heron pond netting. Newts can turn up anywhere, even on lawns and in borders.)
Spiders Love the dead litter of wood club-rush, but if you move the litter and heap it elsewhere, the spiders won't travel, probably because they have already fled as you approached, and even if the heap is relocated nearby, the spiders don't seem to want to know.
If a stone is left on a grassy bank or path, thrushes may use it as an anvil.
Moorhens will nest in soft rush tussocks in shallow water, and need thick cover for their chicks which seem to take a long time to mature, and there may be 2 lots of chicks. Meanwhile they appear to denude a pond of dragon and damselfly larvae, though their diving provides great entertainment value. If you want to nurture your dragonflies, consider cutting the rush back around the pond edges, perhaps every other year or similar, depending on your priorities - eg allow moorhens for 2 years, cut the rush in autumn, to prevent moorhens from nesting and to lessen predation of the dragonflies in year 3, or whatever.
Planning a pond in a field - It is only too easy to irremediably destroy one habitat when creating a new one. The same might apply to new drainage ditches, the current general advice seems to be not to drain fields but leave them to soak up and filter surface water, even to block up existing ditches.
Planning a pond - a major concern for the future - How is it to be maintained, especially if running water passes through? A third of the silt and weed may have to be cleaned out each autumn, and Where should the spoil be placed? A digger might be needed to reach into the pond and dredge out some of the silt and weed, and a tractor and trailer needed to move the spoil. Access? There can be a lot of spoil - Where is it to go? Year after year? If spread on the meadow, it may enrich the soil and introduce rampant vegetation.
Kingfishers need perches, and won't dive unless there are some areas of open water in a pond.
Running water might mean that silt is washed down into a pond (a silt trap can help), but it does keep the water clear. Running water won't necessarily prevent blanket weed, but damsel flies do lay their eggs on the blanket weed. Barley straw bales might help with blanket weed marginally, but it's easy to forget to remove them at the end of the summer.
No need to plant up a pond; plants, insects and snails will colonise it.
Planting new scrub and trees - are they local to the immediate area? See the discussions re sowing local seeds on this site. https://forum.moremeadows.org.uk/viewto ... ?f=23&t=55 It's so very easy to give into enthusiasm and shopping fever, and plant something inappropriate to the immediate area.
Insect magnets: common figwort, common burdock, willow, sycamore (tree bumblebees can mass around the flowers), spindle and hawthorn flowers, hogweed, vetches, bugle, any deadnettle in sun, clover, water mint, self heal, dog rose, ivy, great willowherb. Where there are few flowers such as on a moor, a lone flowering bramble patch can attract scores of butterflies.
Ivy grown up fence posts is a quicker route to flowers and berries, it flowers at the top of its support and brings the insects down to eye level.
Looking through binoculars the wrong way, is a useful alternative to a hand lens.
Dried topped meadow grass left in a heap for 9 months can be a brilliant garden mulch. Moving it straight away before the rain, and leaving it undisturbed, avoids breathing in the really horrid fusty moulds which develop in the first few months. Many animals, especially heavy animals, given the chance, love to play King of the Castle on a heap, and it can be lost to trampling and the mud.
On wet ground, cocksfoot is not deep rooting.
A large and mysterious mound of bare earth with no obvious exit holes, may be a mole fortress, a refuge or nest chamber raised up above the water table.
(from personal amateur experience.)
It would be easier, and can save heart ache and hours of labour or boring tractor driving, to practice meadow management on small spaces first. Don't bite off far more than...
Borrowing grazing animals for short periods might be ideal, but is difficult to achieve in reality.
If the land is fenced, it offers many more options for management, over different years. It's relatively expensive, but, once done, it should last at least 10 years, probably far longer. The chemicals for preserving fencing posts and stakes aren't as strong as they used to be, so the timber doesn't last as long as it used to.
Grazing animals can pull out the thatch more than machines, though a flail mower collector does a clean job. Grazing animals vastly reduce the work of cutting and collecting mechanically, though both will probably still be needed. A flail mower collector will find out every lump and bump in a field. Before flattening every bump, consider, is it an ancient hedgeline, part of the history of the landscape?
Thinking of buying grazing animals - one of the first questions, is - where will they live for the winter?
If you have devil's bit scabious, don't let sheep in, or at least - ration them carefully, they love devil's bit scabious, and will graze it down hard, reducing the flowering and possibly even killing it off.
Machinery is expensive to buy and maintain, but saves hours of manual labour. A thought for office workers who might be unaccustomed to manual labour.
Teeny weeny machines with small cutting widths seem to take forever to cover any space.
Widening a gate, so that a contractor can access the land can be well worth while.
Strimming - can be used to cut the sward at different heights. (Be your own cow.) Cutting at half height first - may mean double the swish, but it gives relative peace of mind if you can check for hedgehogs, frogs, etc, first, before cutting very short. A quicker and better alternative might be to ask a dog to sniff through the long grass tussocks and the flattened soft rush, before you go near there with a strimmer. This also give you time to notice and rescue any caterpillars on the top leaves, and to rescue any particularly precious remaining seedheads.
Clearing cut grass - long grass or rush - long tines, a fork is best, short grass - short tines, a rake is better. It's well worth seeking out lightweight comfortable tools which fit the individual human frame, and can make a job a lot more pleasant, and save energy which means more gets done. Second hand tools can often be sharpened and are sometimes more lightweight than modern ones.
A battery operated strimmer can free one up from waiting for someone else to bring on their machinery. They can be relatively very light, take an hour to charge, and last about 10-20 mins. That's enough to make a job bite-sized. It can take 3-4 times as long to clear up the grass. So that's a good way of setting a limit. Doing a small amount completely, cut and cleared, on one occasion, using different muscles, and lessening the chance of walking like a neanderthal that evening. Or, you could just buy 2 batteries. 2 lightweight batteries may well be preferable to one heavy weight one.
A wheeled petrol-driven strimmer is unlikely to cope well with rough ground. Either the wheels or the nose gets stuck in a dip or rut, and then the machine needs to be manhandled free. It may also turn the long vegetation into mush which is more awkward to pick up by fork or rake, than the longer swathes left by an ordinary strimmer.
Pay for a contractor or buy your own machinery and do it yourself? If you have wide gates, largish areas without tight corners, few obstacles such as trees, and are short of time, then a contractor may save you hours and hours of time. It is unbelievably tedious to trundle up and down several acres' worth of fields with small-width machinery. On the plus side, if you diy, you may choose to cut in strips as and when you choose, avoid cutting certain areas or plants at certain times of year, and may wiggle around as you choose. A contractor will come when he wants, and few will want to be bothered with small tight areas, and he'll cut the whole lot at once, he'll probably not want to leave that precious small area that you want to save for later.
If you save the cuttings for your garden compost - that gives more flexibility of timing for the cut; you can cut in Sept or October, promoting your late flowers such as fleabane, betony and devil's bit scabious, rather than if you have to wait for that good weather and peak of ripeness in June for a hay cut which is when the contractor is particularly busy. The downside of cutting later, is that the grass may be longer (if you haven't cut or grazed in early summer,) and the grass and rush may be lying flat and is thence more difficult to cut. The grass will also be wetter, and the ground will be wetter and more prone to compaction.
It's worth cutting some particular areas early, in late spring/early summer, such as grassy areas with late flowering plants such as betony, sneezewort, marsh woundwort and devil's bit scabious, or areas of sharp rush with fleabane and loose strife, as otherwise these flowers can be utterly swamped at their flowering time by long grass or rush which has been left uncut all year. Cutting some strips and recording the time of year, (eg by a photo), will help one assess the best time to cut for that particular site and that particular plant, eg perhaps early June for betony and marsh woundwort.
Cutting sharp and soft rush in early-mid summer may prevent it from flowering and seeding, and falling smotheringly flat, later in Sept/Oct, but this has to be weighed up with the risk of involuntarily cutting unripe orchid or marsh valerian seed heads, or emerging loose strife which also grow within the rush. Cutting in sections is probably the answer, cut some, save some. Cut different sections next year.
Long swathes of cut soft rush is useful to place on top of muddy paths in the winter. I use mine around poultry houses, especially where water fowl dibble. Being water resistant, the rush sits on top of the mud, but is broken down and absorbed by the summer. A useful and free alternative to wood chippings.
Leaving an area of uncut grass and flower stems over winter is said to provide homes for many invertebrates. Seed heads will open and seeds fall at the natural time, and food on the ground and on standing stems may remain available for the wildlife. Wrens and sparrows may often be seen foraging in amongst the grass tussocks.
DWT advised me to cut standing stems at the end of winter, just before spring when everything, plants and invertebrates, wakes up and starts moving. However, the grass stems flatten in the autumn, and by the end of winter there may be a thick solid thatch covering the soil, which blocks light and prevents new seeds or delicate plants from pushing through. One could harrow, or hand rake the flattened grass stems to raise them up and then cut them in late February, but the hand raking is jolly hard work, so perhaps think very carefully about the location, extent, and permanency/rotation of the grassy areas left standing over winter. (If people have a high proportion of flower stems to grass stems in their meadow, then perhaps they don't have this problem.)
If canary grass, wood club-rush and fleabane stems are left standing all winter, the stems are rotting by the end of winter and are relatively easy to pull out. The wood club-rush leaves will flatten and will rot down by mid winter, and it is probably best removed in part then, before the frogs are massing and using it for cover at spawning time.
If moor grass tussocks are burned at the end of the winter, (as advised to me by DWT - apparently it makes the grass more palatable), the dead thatch is removed, and, the most beautiful, waving, fountain of fresh green leaves delights the eye throughout the summer (if the green fountain is not nibbled to half height by animals). I used a gas torch.
Purple loose strife - starts growing up to 2 months earlier and bulks up much much bigger if it grows as a marginal on the edge of a pond with its roots actually in the water, compared with loose strife growing on damp ground out of water (this observation was of multiple clones of the same age = cuttings).
Loose strife doesn't appear above ground until very late, sometimes late May, sometimes even around the end of June in N Devon. Lookalike earlier leaves usually belong to ragged robin.
Giving loosestrife the 'Chelsea chop' i.e. chopping the stems down by 1/3 or a half in late June or whenever it is growing vigorously, will delay flowering and can increase the number of flowering stems. Cut half the plant, and the first half will flower sooner, followed later by the second half, extending the flowering season. If the loosestrife is growing in or next to water, just let the cut stems fall into the water, and leave them there. A couple of months later the cut stems will be producing roots and can be planted in the autumn, or left to die down for the winter in a bucket partially filled with water a couple of cm deep, until they wake up the following year.
Loosestrife is fantastic for bees and very showy. Plant some where the deer can't reach the flower heads.
If ragged robin is growing in the bottom of permanently wet ditch, it is very easy to pull apart the rosettes in the early part of the year and replant them in another wet area, where they will gallop away. Ditto, brooklime, water mint, meadow sweet, fleabane in May, anything really which spreads by rhizomes or running stems.
Devil's bit scabious and betony can produce plants with white flowers. Cuckoo flower comes in single and double forms. If you want to find out more about a plant, google its common name and doublecheck the images to find its latin name, then you'll find much more information and studies if you search with the latin name.
Marsh ragwort and thistles have the earliest flowers turning to seed whilst on the same head, new buds are forming and flowers are opening. (My conclusion - there's no point in trying to keep the flowers and then to deadhead to prevent seeding, it's one or the other..)
Creeping thistle flowerheads and coarse grass flower heads can ripen into seed if left on the ground after cutting, so there's no point in topping/deadheading or pulling them unless you clear them up within a day or so.
Nettle stems and roots, creeping and marsh thistle stems (-before the smallest hint of any buds are formed) and roots, and bindweed can be left to dry out and won't rejuvenate.
It is a Lot Less work to dig out spear thistles and docks in their first winter of life, than to leave them to develop. Grappling with a flowering spear thistle is both tricky and painful, and leaving any of the flowers to develop can result in innumerable seeds floating off in the wind to cause a lot more work next year. Leaving any apparently spent spear thistle stems, can mean that more flower and seedheads develop before one passes by again.
New tiny peacock caterpillars are to be found at the very tip of a nettle in a web, and work their way down a little, before moving to other nettles. Contrary to popular recommendations, butterflies will often lay on small isolated nettle plants.
If deadheaded early, with roots left in the ground, docks and thistles develop multiple replacement flowerheads.
Docks can have very wide branching roots, far far wider than the leaf canopy in spring, and sometimes the roots are all to one side, perhaps if they have met a stone. This is worth remembering so that one may first dig at a greater distance from the leaves than might be apparently needed, to lessen the risk of slicing through or breaking the roots, and the chance of the root remnants regrowing next year. Docks sprayed in the previous year, may regenerate the next, with a new root forming alongside a blackened one. If a single dock or creeping thistle is seen in grassland, there are likely to be others lurking nearby.
(A fear lurks - that docks are undergoing a process of reevaluation, similarly to the reestablishment of yellow rattle, (ha!), and the general wisdom may one day be changed, to advise their retention - so all those efforts of digging out might, in the future, be deemed unnecessary - but for now..the thing is, if they are left, there remains the annual continual task of deadheading, so digging out is, to my mind, the lesser task.)
If knapweed has its spent flowers deadheaded before seed is formed, it does not, unlike many garden flowers, produce a fresh flush of blooms. However, cutting back some of one's knapweed plants in June, just as the first flower stems and buds form, (or allowing a few grazing animals in to trample/graze some,) can delay their flowering until September/Oct - extending the season from the end of July for the uncut plants, to mid Sep-mid Oct for the June-cut plants, when there is not so much on offer for pollinators. The purple of knapweed seems to 'glow' in the duller light of September and is more remarkable in that month.
Hard seedheads of knapweed often contain insect larvae growing fat on the seeds. Knapweed seedheads with a little 'give' usually still retain their seeds. The lookalike seeds on opened knapweed seedheads are actually the old bracts. Leaving knapweed seedheads uncut, will attract flocks of goldfinches to eat the seeds from early autumn and into mid winter.
If hemlock water dropwort and meadowsweet are cut early, they don't regrow much if at all and do not flower that year.
------------(update: just found an article on meadow sweet - to precis -. If you want to encourage it, hope for wet weather and don't cut, if you find it is crowding out other species, cut it. https://www.floodplainmeadows.org.uk/si ... lished.pdf)
The leaves of a mature plant of knapweed will suppress grass for the width of the rosette. A clump of meadow sweet, left all summer to grow tall, flower and set seed, will shade out the grass beneath.
Colour themed wild flowers/common weeds can look good and save work in a border (eg yellow wild flowers in a hot border). Some wild flowers will grow in rich soil, though they may become lanky and flop in borders. Buttercups, wood avens, bitter vetch, greater birdsfoot trefoil, knapweed, yarrow, purple loose strife, can all look terrific in flower in a colour themed garden border.
A carpet of flowering ransoms can look terrific in a shady area (Caerhays woodland garden in Cornwall).
Meadow plants (weeds) in the garden border can be treated as 'spares' and replanted in the meadow in the bare soil left behind from digging up a dock, or sow seeds there, to beat the dock seeds in the race towards light.
It's a complete waste of time and money and hope, sowing seeds, if you can't control the grass in the following year. Get the grass reduced in vigour before sowing any seeds.
If regenerating the seed bank naturally rather than stripping and scarifying, it is Far Better to control the grass and sacrifice any flowers for the first few years, as the flower plant roots will remain and the plants will bulk up, even without flowering.
Bare patches in the autumn can be temptingly deceptive, grass roots can lurk underneath and overwhelm precious seedlings in the next spring.
If a new layer of acid clay subsoil is deposited, and left alone, the only colonisers for the first few years are creeping buttercup and ribwort plantain. However, if desired roadside verge and hedgerow seed has been sown there, nothing may seem to happen for 3 years, and then 'suddenly' the hedgerow plants appear - thinking of tares and vetches.
Marsh mallow seeds can be collected when ripe by putting some sort of tray equivalent underneath to catch them when they scatter out of the seed pods. In wet weather, some seeds germinate within the seed pod and can be easily transplanted and grown on.
Red campion and common figwort seeds germinate readily and are useful as a quick cover of bare earth to ward off unwanted weed seedlings. A tough mat of yarrow can be used in the same way.
Common figwort is worth encouraging as it attracts the eyecatching wasp lookalike, the figwort sawfly.
Forgot to sow yellow rattle in the autumn - or had too much grass then? It's worth a try, and sometimes this works, sometimes not, but the seed is said to not be viable after a year anyway - so try putting yellow rattle seeds in a fridge (not a freezer) in moist perlite or sand, in January. Leave for 6 weeks*. Sow in bare patches of earth, treading them or pressing them well in to the damp earth so as to try to disguise them from the birds and ensure contact with the damp soil. The treading-in is time consuming. If not pressed in, the seeds may germinate because they were moistened in the fridge, and then immediately dry out; one sees a pathetic litle dried and dead seed root.... (Rattle normally germinates before many other seeds, on bare soil, from late Feb/March depending on the weather. It needs grass plants growing nearby for its food.) It's a fiddly process to sow moist seeds, but may be worth doing for small areas. Check in good light on the next day, or after frost, to see if there are any seeds which have not been pressed down into the soil. ...... However ..... don't leave it forgotten in the fridge - it may well germinate in there. (If germinated seed is found in time, this then leads to a rush to sow the germinated seed outside, into what might be inclement weather (horrid for the human, the rattle probably doesn't mind) and cold wet soil. A recipe for probable disaster.)
If the rattle seed germinates in the fridge and remains forgotten, the whole lot of this expensive seed will die. (I've done it all.)
Putting a left over bag of mixed seeds in the fridge in moist perlite or sand, might work if done in early spring so the bare patches of soil are warm at the time of sowing, as long as one is able to control any competition from grass or other things.
No need for seeds - left alone, many wild flowers spread rapidly, vegetatively, eg fleabane, yarrow, betony, bugle, clover and selfheal, even if the flowers are topped.
It can be much much easier and far less work, to spread many wanted plants by division, when you have substantial plant parts to begin with and may put them straight into the ground in late winter, than by sowing seed into trays and growing on. Primroses are easy to multiply by pulling apart in late winter, and replanting.
Self heal is a great ground cover for borders and lawns and it's easy to pull rooted stems off and press them into a new area. Massed white clover on a lawn emits a heady scent equivalent to moorland heather on a sunny day.
Wild flower seedheads are easier to find on wide roads than on narrow isolated country lanes which are often cut hard back for visibility. Lay bys are often a good source for seedheads.
Autumn is a lovely time for scattering seedheads, if you have left them to mature and not cut earlier in the year. Pinging seedheads can be seriously addictive, especially the 'electric' jumping of the devil's bit scabious - just try to remain aware of what you are scattering. Is that tempting umbellifer seedhead really angelica or is it hogweed, or hemlock water dropwort? They all look alluring in their ripe seedhead state.
Marsh violet colonies may be lurking underneath the skirts of purple moor grass.
Brash piles, whether in shade or sun, produce brambles, and later, nettles. Blackbirds may nest in a brash pile. A crumbled log is a wonderful soil conditioner. Even just one decaying log may attract a greater spotted woodpecker to your garden.
When browsing, deer and ponies will tear off branches - no clean cuts and no apparent difference except in extent, to flailing. Deer love hogweed and elder, orchid seedheads and loosestrife flowers. Deer and electric fencing don't mix (or, I should say - deer invariably become entangled in the wire and break it, poor things). (Hedgehogs can become entangled in electric poultry netting. Grass snakes ditto in anti-heron pond netting. Newts can turn up anywhere, even on lawns and in borders.)
Spiders Love the dead litter of wood club-rush, but if you move the litter and heap it elsewhere, the spiders won't travel, probably because they have already fled as you approached, and even if the heap is relocated nearby, the spiders don't seem to want to know.
If a stone is left on a grassy bank or path, thrushes may use it as an anvil.
Moorhens will nest in soft rush tussocks in shallow water, and need thick cover for their chicks which seem to take a long time to mature, and there may be 2 lots of chicks. Meanwhile they appear to denude a pond of dragon and damselfly larvae, though their diving provides great entertainment value. If you want to nurture your dragonflies, consider cutting the rush back around the pond edges, perhaps every other year or similar, depending on your priorities - eg allow moorhens for 2 years, cut the rush in autumn, to prevent moorhens from nesting and to lessen predation of the dragonflies in year 3, or whatever.
Planning a pond in a field - It is only too easy to irremediably destroy one habitat when creating a new one. The same might apply to new drainage ditches, the current general advice seems to be not to drain fields but leave them to soak up and filter surface water, even to block up existing ditches.
Planning a pond - a major concern for the future - How is it to be maintained, especially if running water passes through? A third of the silt and weed may have to be cleaned out each autumn, and Where should the spoil be placed? A digger might be needed to reach into the pond and dredge out some of the silt and weed, and a tractor and trailer needed to move the spoil. Access? There can be a lot of spoil - Where is it to go? Year after year? If spread on the meadow, it may enrich the soil and introduce rampant vegetation.
Kingfishers need perches, and won't dive unless there are some areas of open water in a pond.
Running water might mean that silt is washed down into a pond (a silt trap can help), but it does keep the water clear. Running water won't necessarily prevent blanket weed, but damsel flies do lay their eggs on the blanket weed. Barley straw bales might help with blanket weed marginally, but it's easy to forget to remove them at the end of the summer.
No need to plant up a pond; plants, insects and snails will colonise it.
Planting new scrub and trees - are they local to the immediate area? See the discussions re sowing local seeds on this site. https://forum.moremeadows.org.uk/viewto ... ?f=23&t=55 It's so very easy to give into enthusiasm and shopping fever, and plant something inappropriate to the immediate area.
Insect magnets: common figwort, common burdock, willow, sycamore (tree bumblebees can mass around the flowers), spindle and hawthorn flowers, hogweed, vetches, bugle, any deadnettle in sun, clover, water mint, self heal, dog rose, ivy, great willowherb. Where there are few flowers such as on a moor, a lone flowering bramble patch can attract scores of butterflies.
Ivy grown up fence posts is a quicker route to flowers and berries, it flowers at the top of its support and brings the insects down to eye level.
Looking through binoculars the wrong way, is a useful alternative to a hand lens.
Dried topped meadow grass left in a heap for 9 months can be a brilliant garden mulch. Moving it straight away before the rain, and leaving it undisturbed, avoids breathing in the really horrid fusty moulds which develop in the first few months. Many animals, especially heavy animals, given the chance, love to play King of the Castle on a heap, and it can be lost to trampling and the mud.
On wet ground, cocksfoot is not deep rooting.
A large and mysterious mound of bare earth with no obvious exit holes, may be a mole fortress, a refuge or nest chamber raised up above the water table.
