The first of July seems a long time ago.

Hay has been cut. Twice.

A shed has been built. Seeds have been shed – pale stem straws, shimmering.

Or catapulted. Crisp, hairy and augured. Rain has fallen, at times heavily. Miraculously, those same, now sperm-like storksbill’s, Erodium manescavii, encased embryos straighten, on sodden lichened slabs. Limp, and drilling nowhere.

Marooned in puddles, until the sun’s dehydrating powers returns, to flex and bend and drive.The bullfinch chick chomps, Pyrrhula pyrrhula, between squeaky-hinge monotones.Swallow chicks have visibly grown. Daily.

Have fledged. And flown. The days are shortening, and are occasionally wonderful.And sometimes glowering. Typical July here in upland Carmarthenshire, in fact.

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A significant threshold has been crossed this month, in that we’ve engaged help for the first time, from Paul with decorating our chimneys, and from William with helping me construct a hay shed, designed in the nether regions of my mind, not even on the back of an envelope, for storing our big bags of hay. A fascinating exercise in frequent, practical, unanticipated problem solving, which occurred on almost every day of the build. By co-incidence a report this week, click here, from the U.S.A, suggests that paying others to do your chores, is the secret to happiness.

Really? We don’t actually consider either of the above tasks as chores, just part of the necessary process of trying to keep the place in good order, and leaving it in a better state than we found it. However, we’re slowly realising that we just can’t manage to get everything done ourselves, and some jobs are now physically a bit beyond us. We’ve been very grateful for their help and effort, and hope that in William’s case, we can provide him with some regular work around the place as well as assisting him as he establishes his own business.

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The first day of the month saw us opening the garden for the last time this year, along with walks through our meadows, since this year July 1st was designated as National Meadows Day, for the third year running. This event has succeeded in raising the profile of wildflower meadows, and we were pleased to once again be one of just 120 venues across the UK which held events to contribute to this process. It’s now a well known fact, but worth repeating, that 97% of all traditional wildflower meadows have been lost in the UK over the last 70 years, yet they are amazingly valuable ecosystems rich in plant, animal and fungal diversity. Click here for more on the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group, set up to try to raise awareness of these environments in our county.

The last week in June was extremely disappointing with grey skies and rain, but the first of July dawned with heavy clouds retreating Eastwards, and sunshine returning.In the end, a very successful day was held, with both our morning and afternoon slots pretty fully booked, and with almost no car parking spaces left in our yard.

Visitors came from as far afield as Gloucestershire, Manchester, and Swansea and it was particularly pleasing that whilst a lot were gardeners, some had a real interest in wildflower meadows, and were keen on learning a little more about our meadows and how we manage them. We always find the exchange of ideas, experience and knowledge which comes out of these events is one of the main benefits to us, and we often get just as much out of it, as our visitors.

I was keen to share my enthusiasm as a cross over gardener, come meadow manager, of the complexity of life that a managed meadow represents. And a point I raised with both morning and afternoon groups as we walked round, was the fact that our hay meadow now has three separate locally sourced hemi-parasitic flowering plants as constituents of the meadow sward. The first two of which are significant nectar rich flowers for our indigenous bumblebees (Yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, and Lousewort, Pedicularis sylvatica).

The third, and last, to flower is the much smaller Eyebright, Euphrasia nemorosa, (and related spp.) which is really one of a large complex group of very similar looking flowers, and hybrids or species which even keen botanists can struggle to differentiate. Add in a few nitrogen fixing legumes – Common bird’s-foot and Greater bird’s-foot trefoils, Lotus corniculatus, and peduculatus, White and Pink clover, Trifolium repens, and pratense, and the myriad of, for much of the year, unobserved fungi and there is already a huge and very varied matrix of living organisms in this small meadow, apart from the grasses and mosses, and many of which are a feature of our very damp climate.I posed the question to our many visitors, do gardeners know of any hemi-parasitic plants which are widely available, or commonly incorporated, into garden planting schemes? I couldn’t think of any, and none of our guests seemed to be able to either. So there seems to be this real contrast between such an interconnected natural meadow ecosystem, on very poor soil, and a typical herbaceous planting scheme. The former has minimal external nutrient input, and indeed some significant natural plant suppression through hemi-parasitism, and regular removal of much of the vegetation through hay cropping and grazing.

The latter has plants typically set out separately, and distinct from any neighbouring plants, and often with much additional organic matter in the way of mulch or nutrient, is added. This divergence between a natural, and a more contrived community, and their very different aesthetics, intrigues me greatly.

By the end of this last day of opening for the NGS, we’d exceeded the total visitor numbers we’d managed in any of our previous years of opening, in spite of being open for fewer days, which was very pleasing. We’ve also now decided on our plans for opening next year, to take account of what we feel comfortable with. This will mean opening on very few days, in February to May only, though other dates will be available for groups of 15 or more. Please see the Visiting the Garden page for more details.

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As light relief from physical work, I’ve managed to finish reading James Hitchmough’s excellent “Sowing Beauty – Designing Flowering Meadows from Seed” book, which I’ve mentioned before. It’s a fantastic piece of work, and one which I’d thoroughly recommend, though sections of it are quite technically written, and much of it is most obviously directed at designers, perhaps planning larger scale projects. However, I love the detail, with which he has researched his subject – of trying to recreate natural communities of plants, by sowing seed, rather than just using plants, and by trying to create long lived communities of plants which will coexist and thrive together. And where management time for the created areas is vastly reduced, over more conventional herbaceous plantings.

Many of his designs are mixes of species from different continents, which would never actually be found growing together “in the wild”, but which all favour similar conditions. There are certainly concepts and features in the book, which can be taken on board by any gardener – for example:The need to carefully consider the different zones of planting conditions which occur in any garden, for example dry shade, dappled shade, moist shade, moist full sun, dry full sun, etc.

The critical role that herbivory by slugs plays in any maritime climate (particularly West Wales!) This doesn’t just affect which plants you may opt to grow, but also impacts on the long term sustainability of a plant population, since plants which may be slug resistant as adults, might still have seedlings which are very vulnerable to slug predation, and such seedlings might be necessary to rejuvenate a planting design, once the original plants have, inevitably over time, died. Even if slug control is used, it was sobering to read that within 6 weeks of a slug treatment, re-colonisation of an area by slugs will be significant.

The sheer numbers of weed seed, in a typical soil seed bank, about 50,000 per square metre, and how at least 75 mm of some sort of mulch (he tends to prefer sand), needs to be used in his designs in order to suppress such weed seed germination, whilst his selected plant species germinate, and establish.

A comprehensive list of spreadsheets, recording the actual measured variations in seed germination, of well over 600 different species of potentially useful plant species, when grown under identical conditions – this can vary from less than 10% to well over 70% germination success.

That regular irrigation, or rainfall, to supply moisture during the germination of a seed, can be a critical factor in influencing just how high a rate of germination can be achieved, with any particular species.

In his appraisals of natural meadow, steppe and prairie ecosystems from across the world, many plant species are flagged as having potential value to gardeners in the UK, and the book is full of useful links and critical assessments of where such seeds, or plants, can be sourced. However, I have pretty much failed to find any source of a Pedicularis species, (there are over 350 worldwide) other than our native Lousewort. Similarly there are few sources of any Rhinanthus species (other than our Yellow rattle) or Euphrasia species, of which there are 450. The concept of gardeners trying to incorporate hemi-parasitic plants is unlikely to take off anytime soon, it seems, maybe in part because for many of the continental members of these genera, there is very little information on which plants they naturally parasitise, in their endemic range. And without the right host species, the hemi-parasite probably won’t survive and thrive.

About the same time as finishing this book, I’ve also picked up on the recent publishing of the crowd source funded research (by Goulson, Lentola, David, Abdul-Sada, Tapparo, E M Hill, of Sussex and Padua Universities) into the contamination of many commercially produced garden plants, with fungicides and pesticides. The investigation was prompted by a suspicion that many plants which gardeners were being sold as “pollinator friendly”, were actually contaminated with fungicides and insecticides, which might indeed be toxic to the very insects visiting the flowers, for pollen or nectar.

It’s worth following this link (click here) to read the whole paper, and its disturbing findings, gleaned by purchasing plants from 5 retail sources in East Sussex, and then analysing both leaf and pollen samples, for a range of chemicals – 8 insecticides and 16 fungicides, widely used by commercial horticulturalists.

Only 2 out of the 29 “bee-friendly” plants sampled contained no traces of such chemicals, and one was a daffodil, which generally have very poor insect appeal anyway. At the other extreme, Erica carnea, a commonly sold pollinator friendly heather contained traces of 10 different chemicals. The researchers discuss exactly what the implications of this cocktail of chemical exposure to bees might be, but the irony of marketing plants as appealing to bees, whilst simultaneously being tainted with potentially toxic chemicals is made clear.

This made me reflect, once again, on how we humans fare with commercially grown fruit and vegetables, where we have no idea of what might be used on the crops out in the field. Click here for an attempt to highlight the most contaminated common fruit and vegetables, at least in the U.S.A. As with the bumblebee research, it’s unlikely that there will be ever be significant funding provided by any commercial interest into further research into this. So consumers may prefer either to grow their own, or buy organically produced food perhaps, if they want to reduce such risks of exposure?

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I recalled a fellow meadow owner once telling me about a technique for ageing a meadow by counting buttercups. At last this week, I managed to track down the research, originally carried out in 2009 by John Warren at Aberystwyth University. Click here to read the whole paper, which is enlightening and not too full of scientific jargon.

The basic premise is that you collect, or count, the flowers of 100 Creeping buttercups, Ranunculus repens, which is a common grassland, and indeed garden, “weed” throughout much of the UK. A normal creeping buttercup flower has 5 petals, but aberrant flower mutations occur where there are more than this number of petals.

Warren explains that since the creeping buttercup largely spreads by vegetative means with runners, and therefore relies on such asexual non-seed reproduction, then for every one flower found with more than 5 petals, you can assume that the meadow is 7 years old. So if, say, you find 14 such flowers in every 100 you look at, then the meadow is about 100 years ago.

Knowing that our meadows are likely to be quite old, we thought we’d try this out. You have to distinguish the creeping buttercup from other common field buttercups, like the meadow buttercup and bulbous buttercup, and apparently the accuracy of the system tends to break down after July (though frustratingly the paper doesn’t say whether this is the beginning or end of July!), since flower morphology naturally changes a bit with flowers which are produced later in the season.

Wandering back up from the bottom field, we walked through our “Cae efail” (blacksmith’s field) and picked the first 3 flowers we found. Much to our surprise they all had 6 or more petals. Encouraged, we continued, and the final tallies below showed firstly, that by roving independently across the field, we both seemed to find a similar ratio, of typical 5 petalled to more petalled mutated flowers. In addition, you’ll notice that Fiona was a more efficient collector. I’d only got 18 and 30; she had 36 and 65, so an average of just over 36% of more than 5 petal flowers.A little maths implies a meadow age of well over 200 years.

Warren’s paper describes quite clearly how such an obviously visible macro mutation can be maintained within a population simply by vegetative means, and that by sampling populations from across the country from meadows of known age, the simple 7 years per mutant flower formula seems to hold good.

We were clearly at the end of the creeping buttercup flowering period when we performed the count, but this is definitely something we’ll try next year in our other fields. Being able to confirm that our meadows’ ages are closely linked to the age of the construction of our house, which dates to the early 1700’s or so, is very exciting, and confirms what a special opportunity we have here to restore at least some of the meadows to a more floriferous and diverse state.

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I made three invertebrate sightings this month, which fall into the occasionally seen category.

Firstly a number of Devil’s coach horse beetle, Ocypus olens, have been spotted. These are aggressive, mainly nocturnal, carnivorous beetles, and the largest of about 1000 species of “Rove” beetles in the UK, so called because they move around constantly when disturbed. You sometimes find them during the day if you lift a log or disturb them, in this case by cutting the croquet lawn.

If threatened, they adopt a scorpion like posture and will emit a foul smelling liquid from white glands at the rear of the abdomen.They also possess quite fearsome mandibles for catching their prey, and indeed self defence. Predators of slugs, woodlice, other invertebrates and carrion, they play a useful role in limiting the numbers of some of these in our gardens and meadows. Click here for more on their life cycle. I’m very grateful to several members of the CMG for identifying this beetle for me.

Why the common name? In Irish mythology, where it’s known as the Devil’s beetle, or Dar Daoul, it was thought to imbibe evil powers by eating the bodies of sinners, and then be capable of killing someone with just a look. People were encouraged to kill it if they found one, but with great care, because of its assumed mystical powers. Apparently the only safe way to do this, was to lift it with a shovel and hurl it into a fire.

Or even turn its mythical powers to your advantage – apparently some Irish reapers imprisoned beetles in the handles of their scythes to improve their scything skills!

Secondly another impressively relaxed, abseiling slug greeted me one morning this month, as I tried to leave the house by the back door, first thing in the morning. Perfectly placed mid-way between the door frames, I could just squeeze past the vertical slime thread either side, as the slug twisted and flexed its body as it slowly moved towards the ground.

“Dropped” is just too active a word for it. “Slugged” has the appropriate sense of slow, inevitable tedium about its gradual fall, but implies more effort than was evident. “Slimed“, or even “Slimeseiled” might be better verbs to describe something I’ve only witnessed once before, in June 2012. Click here for the link, and more explanation on the properties of slug slime which allows them to achieve this slow descent from height.

Thirdly, our latest effort with hay making proved typical of most here. A snatch and grab, where we had to get the hay cut and under cover within a maximum 48 hour weather window. Two days before we’d had 56 mm of rain, the clouds cleared, the still wet grass was cut and then needed turning 5 times in 36 hours to dry sufficiently before filling 55 big bags. Fortunately the cavalry arrived in the shape of Dave and Theresa, to help us stuff and cart bags – we have a surfeit of hay so it’s great it can go to a good local home.

The first drying day was perfect – sunny with a strong breeze. Tuesday was more humid and oppressive with less wind and even the occasional spot of rain falling. More perfect in fact for the huge annual swarming of Black ants, Lasius niger.As always they congregated on the lime washed East facing stone barn wall, but not at all on our house’s South facing gable wall. They also seemed attracted by a horizontal white tarpaulin.And the white meshed synthetic fabric of the big bags, regardless of orientation. So in one part of the meadow, we were plagued with swarms of ants which settled on us as well, and even bit, or stung, occasionally.

Later in the day, when the bags were filled, and some remained out in the meadow, the ants were still there, but only on the remaining few empty bags lying on the ground, and on the empty top part of the half-filled bag. No ants at all on the filled bags.

Why the preference for certain white surfaces, and not others? I have no idea. It’s really tricky to find out much about ant physiology or behaviour on line – all the top ranked articles are simply about pest control. I also notice that the first time I recorded this event on this blog was July 27th 2011. Some natural phenomena here are much more predictable than our hay making. Click here for more on the Black ant life cycle.

Whilst the drone ants die after their day’s fling, and any successfully mated princesses settle down to chew off their wings and continue their lives beneath ground for another year, or twenty, since this is how old some queen ants can be; we shared a communal post-hay-making pizza in by now glorious early evening sunshine, using the amazing UUNI Mk3. This stainless-steel lightweight oven takes about 13 minutes to warm up to about 400 degrees C, and then cooks a pizza perfectly in 90 seconds or so on an included bake stone, using just a couple of handfuls of wood pellets. A really great contemporary British invention for any pizza fan readers out there.

Click here for more, and a video demonstration from its inventor, Kristian Tapaninaho, a Finnish born entrepreneur, who lives in Edinburgh with his young family, and was inspired to design it because there wasn’t anything else like it available at reasonable cost. UUNI, by the way, means oven in Finnish.

And I can confirm that on just its second outing, I was almost as slick as Kristian, and it makes for a great social event, as well as producing the best home-made pizzas I’ve ever managed in decades.

Today the fields are wet.

The ants have gone.

The crows are scavenging.

Black, after black.

The UUNI rests, waiting for a refuel.