After about 4 years of starting to get to grips with managing and trying to restore the meadows around our cottage home, in 2013 (initially a sadly fairly low priority for us in the long list of jobs to do when you take on a derelict property), I thought it would be helpful to group any postings that I’ve written on the subject of our meadows in one place, in chronological order to save ferreting around through all my previous blog posts. So that’s the purpose of this page.

As of May 2015, I volunteered to set up and run a website for the fledgling Carmarthenshire Meadows Group, so now many of the posts I and others write about this subject can be found by clicking here.

Species diversity continues to increase with time, but these are the plants available to our small flock of Tor Ddu sheep to graze on. Compare this with a typical modern, largely flower-free pasture field.

What does any other lamb or other livestock we might choose to eat meat from, actually feed on? Does their diet affect the flavour and nutritional benefit of this meat to us? Does their diet impact on their general health?

Are you aware of how much more carbon is stored, in the soil, of a permanent pasture hay meadow, compared with any other form of land management in the UK – including forestry?

And what about the huge diversity of life which also makes its home in a typical upland hay meadow?

Are you interested, and do you care? If so, do read on, and I hope you might learn something from our journey of discovery, over the years.

For a very quick overview of some key ideas, watch the recorded zoom talk from 2021, covering many important aspects of our wildflower meadows, but do set your YouTube settings to HD, to appreciate the images:

 

 

Or to see how the upper and lower hay meadows were looking in early and mid-June 2024 and mid-July 2021, watch the short YouTube clips below, then compare them with our early scenes, and notes over the years, listed below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you like the look of these meadows and their specific plant mix, we can supply green hay in builder’s big bags for local sites, a few larger plug plants of some special species, and possibly fresh, hand-collected meadow seed to order, and subject to availability. To help you to kick start a traditional wildflower meadow. Do get in touch with us if interested, via email on our “Visiting the garden” web page. Late July to the end of August being the best time of the year to collect these.

From 27/09/2012:

Pounding the upper hay meadow path in drizzle meant I spotted these quite large ( 5 to 6 cm) pinkish brown Waxcap mushrooms.

And as I consulted my excellent Roger Phillips authored ‘Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe’ to identify this large species, the page fell open on Page 62, and there it was, Hygrocybe calyptriformis (calyptraeformis). The appropriately named Pink Waxcap. And even more interestingly, since there were perhaps a dozen of these mushrooms within a few yards of the meadow path, it’s listed as a rare mushroom. In fact so rare that it features as one of the few Red Data Book mushroom species in the UK, and it’s been given a place in Biodiversity Action Plans for the UK. If you’re interested in more on this species, click here for what seems to be a very comprehensive 27-page review of it and its distribution, produced by Plantlife.

Perhaps I should even let someone know I’ve found it since there are so few records of sightings, most of the local ones being in village churchyards, where benign sward neglect allows it to thrive. It joins a list of notable rare species, (e.g. Marsh Fritillary Butterfly, Forester Moth, Trichiosoma sorbii – Club-Horned Sawfly) found at Gelli Uchaf and testament to the currently unspoiled nature of the environment. And yet another encouraging endorsement of how pastures will become more bio-diverse over time if you stop the N.P.K fertilizer and intensive grazing! Also as I’ve written in the blog before, several Waxcap species have a stronghold in the wet mossy unspoiled pastures of Carmarthenshire, and indeed this weekend I think that there are guided fungi forays taking place at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, hoping to find a variety of Waxcaps in the organic grazed pastures of the estate.

And a circuit of the same path in the sunshine was timed perfectly with the setting sun for another ‘Taller when Prone’ moment…

From 10/10/2012:

More mushrooms have popped up in the garden as autumnal temperatures and rainfall stimulate fruiting, including a rare Yellow Waxcap probably Hygrocybe subglobispora, in the High Meadow, a short distance from all the Red Data Book Pink Waxcaps mentioned in the last post.

Another unknown from the High Meadow

 From 4/07/2013:

Most people in the UK will know that over the last few decades nearly 98% of permanent hay meadows have been ploughed up and lost to more intensive agriculture. We’re incredibly lucky to have a network of small traditional hay meadows in the ‘cwm’ or valleys that Gelli looks out onto. These may not produce the weight of crop that a re-sown, heavily fertilised modern ley will, but the diversity of plants and sheer numbers of flowers that an old hay meadow contains is astounding. And it’s associated huge insect population. Our neighbour’s adjacent hay meadow (above) has reached this glorious state, over the last 20 years, simply by lack of fertiliser application, late hay cutting, and short grazing over the winter months. I can’t say for certain whether Yellow Rattle was even sown into this field, or whether it has arrived on its own, but it’s now a dominant feature. This hemi-parasitic plant has been recognised for some time as being a key element in restoring grassland plant diversity by weakening the growth of some of the more powerful native grasses. One of the last areas where we would like to create an impact at Gelli is indeed our native meadows. None have been ploughed for decades, or received any artificial fertiliser during our time at Gelli (as far as we know!) but certainly not for the last 7 years.

Until we acquired our own sheep last year, we were limited by our ability to control grazing strategies. Starting with just a few sheep meant that last year our High Meadow was under-grazed, and although we manually removed a hay crop from perhaps 15% of the field, the majority of the pasture was left ungrazed until autumn. Our sheep then made very little impact on these lengthy areas over the winter and early spring.

The result has been a fascinating patchwork of appearance by this summer – the areas cut for hay last year are already showing small numbers of Creeping and Meadow Buttercup, Sheep Sorrel, and Dandelions and restrained grass growth.

A very few Yellow Rattle plants have germinated in a couple of places from a few seeds sown last autumn.

There are quite large patches where the scattered seed of Bird’sfoot Trefoil, Lotus corniculatus, sown just 2 years ago, seems to have already been established in an almost monocultural slab, although with different flowering times throughout its population.

And a few areas of Lesser Stitchwort, Germander Speedwell, Pink and White clovers, and even the occasional plant of Pignut.

What has caused this huge variation in how this single, barely 1 acre, meadow looks this year?

Is it the result of inorganic variations beneath the soil surface?

Or are invisible fungal networks or some other organic factors involved? I’ve often wondered how several plants which we grow in the garden (particularly natives) will move in a drifting, and sometimes expanding ring, fashion away from their initial location which they vacate completely within just a few years.(The central green band is of native, Ivy-leaved Bellflower, Wahlenbergia hederacea, in our mossy copse, which has relocated from an original few scraps at the left margin of the image to this central strip. None remains in the original location. I fear that it will die out as it meets the slightly more vigorous non-native Chrysosplenium davidianum, stage right).

Are the same processes at work here?

I’d realised that Yellow Rattle could play a key role in restoring flower diversity in this meadow and so had collected some seeds locally 2 years ago. Sowing these onto our wildflower ‘Berm’ produced a few flowers with viable seed, which last year got sown mainly onto the poorly covered bank above our vegetable big bags

Figuring that this would provide a bigger still yield of seed for sowing into the meadow next year. It has indeed flowered well this year, but I found some fascinating recent papers on the value and techniques for using Yellow Rattle, Rhinanthus minor, in this way to change meadow flower compositions. Click here and here and here. The key points seem to be:

•  Expect it to take 10 years! Actually, I reckon our recent lack of fertiliser use gives us a head start, and hope that 5 years will see a huge change.
• The weight of rattle seed sown in a finite area initially had a big effect on the number of rattle plants growing in the first 3 years, but by year 4, the natural seed production in situ had ironed out these differences. Fresh seed from this year’s harvest must be sown in the autumn since it has poor long-term viability and needs autumn chilling to germinate.
• Until the Yellow rattle has started to weaken natural grass growth, sowing other flowers or ‘forbs’ is not likely to be very successful (although my Birds’foot Trefoil experience seems to contradict this).
• Cutting for hay in late July seems to be the optimum time. This is, fortunately, the usual ideal time in our upland meadows, (weather permitting) since growth is often slower earlier in the year than in lowland areas. Normal hay-making procedures will result in the natural spreading of both Yellow Rattle and other forb seeds around the pasture. Of course, the current trend for silage or haylage completely eliminates the opportunity for Yellow Rattle, and other meadow flowers to have flowered and seeded before being cut down, and is another reason for the lack of diversity in modern pasture fields.
• Short grazing of the pasture in late autumn and early spring is really important – this allows a short height of grass growth for when the annual Yellow Rattle has to germinate, and grow through other plants, and trampling by stock in the autumn helps to push the seed into the ground.
• A shortcut approach discussed in one of the papers above would be to spray off all existing grass with glyphosate, but given our distrust of this omnipotent chemical, is not an option we’d consider.

However, I’m hopeful that some areas of the meadow where the previous year’s rank grass seems to have effectively killed off most of the permanent grass, simply by flopping onto it over winter, provide an opportunity to sow into terrain not dissimilar to a weed killed field, albeit with a healthy mossy soil covering.

From 30/07/2013:

Shortly after my last post, we began our tedious manual small-scale hay-making on our steeply sloping field by strimming off selected areas of our this hay/wildflower meadow. I reckoned strimming around the empty bee hive might be a good idea as well since the developing heatwave may have triggered a swarm nearby. Indeed we’d both seen and heard a mini swarm fly overhead and down our track, a couple of days earlier. So 2 days later I got quite excited when Fiona noticed a few bees exploring the hive entrance at dusk…A day later and the numbers had increased, and another day saw tens of bees around the entrance in the mid-day heat, which by now was regularly hitting the high 20 degrees CBy dusk, activity seemed to have ceased, and keen to see whether anything was happening inside I carefully lifted the top super off the hive (after first pressing an ear to the flaky paint of the exterior for any sound of significant bee activity. None was detected)To my surprise, there were perhaps 50 or 60 bees pressed in between a couple of the combs. But this confirmed my suspicions that all this activity wasn’t real scouting for a new home, but simply exploiting and robbing the residual honey stores left by the previous, long deceased, inhabitants. A later visit from Andy, the beekeeper, confirmed this. Within 2 days the honey had presumably been cleared and no more bees were seen around the hive. Of course, I do wonder if bees are capable of sensing death in a hive like this and perhaps giving it a wide berth as a potential new home. This would be a sensible adaptive trait, given the evident vulnerability of the hive’s current position during the unusual freeze-drying Easterly winds of the previous spring.

The other novelty of this heatwave, which I can only communicate through words, is the range of new smells which haven’t been experienced for some time. And mostly very pleasant ones. Beginning a couple of days after our neighbour had his hay meadow cut. The smell of fresh hay pervading the kitchen in the early morning cool beating the dusk time scent from the honeysuckle outside the front door, which was sufficiently tempting to bring out the Elephant Hawkmoths in time to see them before they faded into the night sky

From 16/08/2013:

A few days later after bringing a bit more hay in from our High Flower Meadow, I remembered to go over to photograph the 2 Helleborines growing under mature Ash trees on the Northern field margin. And there was another tree wasp. Perhaps gaining some nectar, or perhaps just resting up above wet grass level

From 30/08/2013:

In the High Flower Meadow I’ve continued to take off more hay and overgrown grass, using a recently acquired 2-wheeled BCS tractor – (I’ll write about this a little more next time)Raking the cut grass into wind rows for drying and removal, I found this toad hunkered down into its own protective ‘foxhole’ which perhaps helped it evade the vicious scissor action of the sickle bar mower. But how beautifully camouflagedI felt that this image could be improved on when the sun came out, so 5 minutes later I revisited the marked spot, only to find that the toad had moved on – presumably wanting to escape from the drying action of the midday heat. Disappointed, I was about to move on when I realised that it was still there – but it had just moved to one extremity of the 3-inch deep divot, and pressed its nose into the base, and its rear into the air. What finally caught MY eye, was seeing amongst the subtlety of beige and green, the rich tones of itseye

A Sauron-like, divorced, suspended, fiery globe. Watching. Wide Open. And just today in the tyre garden, an immobile Golden Ringed Dragonfly hanging out on the Verbena hastata flowers.

‘Eyes’ wide open.

But then being lidless, its ‘eyes’ can never close Even such a permanently alert sensory apparatus couldn’t prevent chunks from being taken from its wing …

What was the predator? And did the likely dogfight exhaust the wounded dragonfly, which was resting to recuperate?

From 15/09/2013:

The BCS power scythe is temporarily resting as the rain falls and its operator is left with the frankly less appealing task of manually clearing the debris. Its’ ability to tackle old tussocky shoulder-height grasses and rushes in our several acres of lower wet meadow has been formidable, but the plan was always to try to improve this field and increase its diversity over several years. Rather like a garden, bite off too much in one go and early disillusionment is likely to set in

Of course, what to do with so much plant debris was also going to be a big issue. Burning it would be an option, during one of our dry cold wintry spells. But having run my compost reactor, I now appreciate even more the value of decomposed organic matter as a potential soil improver or potting agent. So I’ve gradually worked towards forming the debris into modest length deep-bed sized pilesPerhaps I might even try growing squash on them at some time in the future. If not, then at least the eventually decomposed organic material is more accessible and confined. As with many of the tedious tasks we’ve tackled over the years, rationing one’s efforts to a shortish time each day seems best. Lugging pitchforks full of wet rushes is physically moderately demanding for aging joints, but it’s a good way to work up an appetite for breakfast. However, as with ‘making’ the garden, any transient improvement in the appearance of these meadows that this blogger can achieve will inevitably be quickly undone by the ravages of the climate and geology, once efforts cease

It’s been interesting to spot how quickly one’s intrusion into such wild territory is noted and exploited by the native fox population. Within a day of cutting the rushes, droppings began to appear on tussocks of rush stem that had been left proud of the surrounding wet ground.(Rowan berries for breakfast?)

Perhaps this was simply a drier place to pause? But there’s also a territorial element to it, and I’ve already reworked my own deterrent marking to take account of the fact that HeightMatters.  Interestingly a google of “foxes and defaecation marking” produced a top search of a PDF document produced by Bristol City Council on living with urban foxes. Click here for the link. Quite often in my time as a vet living in Bristol, I would pass 2 or 3 foxes crossing the roads as I travelled the 10 minutes between home and clinic to attend a late night call out. Since living in rural West Wales, whilst foxes are undoubtedly common, one rarely sees them. This deposit below involved at least a 4-foot climb up the rush pile, to be top dog fox(central top, to the right of the darker rushes – and how wonderfully ergonomically designed a good 3 tine pitchfork is?)

But this PDF document also explains how adult foxes can easily scale 6-foot fences or walls. This brings me back to my own use of human male urine as a scent mark deterrent for both rabbits and foxes around the garden and poultry enclosures. I’d had a spell where I was uncertain whether it was really working – at least as far as the rabbits were concerned – scrapes had been appearing again together with droppings on several of our mossy copse paths earlier in the spring. Then a penny dropped. (Sorry).

Having read that foxes have 12 different postures for depositing urine, with females just squatting, I figured that my pee should be directed from the watering can not just onto the ground, but higher up – as though deposited by a more dominant predator. Moreover, if it was placed reasonably regularly and on the leeward sides of mature trees or fence posts, then it stood a much better chance of persisting in our wet climate. Since adopting this modified marking routine, at roughly weekly intervals in late spring, evidence of any rabbit activity in the garden had reduced to almost zero.

Coincidence? Well, one can never be certain, but despite this apparent success at deterring these garden nuisances, a week ago just before dusk I came across a recently killed mature rabbit lying between 2 of our Rhododendron shrubs with the left side of its head missing, but otherwise a superficially unmarked carcase. Intrigued as to what had killed it, I was distracted by another garden finding, but remembered it a couple of hours later, just after dark, so thought I’d nip out and get an image for the blog. I didn’t even take a torch, since I knew where to find the body, and reckoned that the infrared pre-flash and exposure light beam from the camera would be sufficient to focus the shot on the carcase But the body had vanished! I couldn’t see any trace in the dim red glow.

I returned with a torch to search for traces at the spot where the body had been, and then realised that it was still there, but had been covered with leaves and debris, and by now most of its head had been eatenBut what could have been responsible? A fox?

I then found a great online guide to ‘Livestock and Animal Predation Identification’.

You can click here for the full link, which covers foxes, badgers, weasels, and many other potential British predators, but being of North American origin also includes Bobcats, Lynx, and Mountain Lions. (There is a record here of a single mountain lion having been documented as killing 192 ewes in a single night, so I’m glad that we don’t have any of those around!) There are some really sensible guidelines about what signs to look for around the carcase – where wounds are, what has been consumed, teeth marks and sizes, or scratch wounds, etc. all of which I’d missed doing until it was too late, i.e. the body had disappeared completely. But the covering of the carcase with leaves gets mentioned in the section on Bobcats and Lynx, though isn’t included in the section on domestic cat predation. The ‘cat’ will then return to the site later for a further meal from its kill.

From 27/10/2013:

Almost every day for the last 6 weeks has seen us both on rush clearing duties in our lower meadows. The prolonged drier weather this year enabled me to cut almost all of the meadow. Clearing what will inevitably be just the first cut of rushes has taken much longer.But this pitchforking turns out to be very healthy all-over body exercise and has had the added benefit of getting us both down into the field earlier in the day than we’d normally manage. And so on a couple of occasions, I’ve caught sight of a fox exploring to the North of our Upper field. I’m guessing that I was downwind at the time, and it didn’t hear the distinctive sound of the metal gate’s latch being worked as I arrived on site. Both mornings were clear and bright, and one couldn’t help but be impressed by the richness of its distinctive brown/rust black pelt. But I didn’t have my camera to hand and so instead share an image of a wonderful spider’s web net created around a single Stipa stem overhanging from the top of one of the many rush piles which now snake across the fields, like some giant reptilian form.

But at the beginning of this week, Fiona had a much closer encounter with a fox. Close to the pile of road stone that yielded a mystery egg in a previous post, and in torrential rain, she was doing some vital clearing of rain run-off channels on our access track, when she spotted the carcase of a large fox just off the main track surfaceWhat really caught her eye was that the fox was being stripped by a vast number of maggots. I  was able to capture this 24 and 48 hours later, when the rain had abated briefly, and I have to say that even as a retired vet used to some pretty gruesome sights, this was pretty shocking, so skip the next 3 images if squeamish

But it does demonstrate just how quickly and completely a carcase can be stripped and recycled, given mild conditions, by this larval insect form. Though it has its own mystery attached. How did it end up here? If you look closely it seems to have fractured ribs and humerus. Was it hit on our track? Or on the road a few hundred yards away? Or was it shot or caught by the hunt which has started operating nearby again in the last few weeks? Was it even the same fox I’d seen in our meadow earlier in the month? Thoughts to lie and dissipate even as it morphs from animate to skeletal, memory and dream 

And by this curiously stormy and foxy introduction, I arrive at what was initially going to be the main topic of this post before the above episodes made me change tack

From 22/04/2014:

As the first rain for over 2 weeks arrived I’d just managed to complete another topping of the rushes in our 2 lower fields, in a fraction of the time it took us last autumn. Already they are looking more like meadows than rush forests, but such continued effort behind the BCS power scythe has left the body pummelled and in need of some therapeutic keyboard recuperation.The cleared fields and a powerful LED torch meant that the other night I shone the beam from our Magic Terrace garden into the lower (then sheep-less) field to be met with 2 pairs of reflective eyes following my moves. Worried about lamb predation by foxes, I moved down into this field, and the ever-watchful eyes backed off, before slinking out of the field to the South. Just as well, since our twin lambs had chosen this moment to escape the watchful protection of mum and get themselves stuck between the double fencing of the hedge boundary.

But how well will the goslings fare, when they hatch from the nest that a Canada goose has now created close to where I found the large submerged egg a few weeks back?From 4/06/2014:   

With so much to look at in the garden over the last fortnight, why devote most of an overdue post to meadow management thoughts? Simply because it’s difficult to rival the beauty and diversity of a traditional hay meadow, and they’re increasingly rare habitats both nationally and globally. If you read this outside the UK, do let me know whether your country still has any of this type of managed grassland with flowers.

(Our High Meadow in late May, with the first flower heads of Sweet Vernal grass beginning to add to that lush leaf green). Compare this to last year’s image, in late June, of the same field, to show the progress being made

It’s tempting to think that they’re a marvel of nature, and in a way they are, but more specifically their very distinctive flora depends upon the long-term interaction between man and larger grazing animals providing just the right growing conditions for a diverse range of grasses and other flowering plants to blend together. As I started writing this morning, I’ve just received a post from Christine at Croft Garden on the natural delights of machair, which is a variant of this concept found in coastal areas – particularly North West Scotland. Click here for the link to this wonderful piece.

But before this, I’d recently read of the centuries-old traditions of hay meadows and their management in the Transylvania region of Romania. There is a beautiful evocative article from The National Geographic (by presumably the same Adam Nicolson who was brought up by Vita Sackville West and father Nigel Nicolson at the iconic Sissinghurst garden in East Sussex and is married to British wildflower champion Sarah Raven) which you can read by clicking here. This confirms the point that without annual mowing, and removal of a hay crop after many of the flowering plants have set and dropped seed, combined with appropriate grazing, the meadows are quickly colonised by shrubby species and revert to the dominant natural plant populations of scrub and then forest within a handful of years.

What particularly struck me about this piece was the simple, frugal existence of these, by-hand, haymaking Romanian smallholders (most with no more than a few acres of land). And also the awareness, knowledge, and appreciation that they possess of the plant diversity in these upland meadows. Apparently, even young children can identify about 50 percent of the nearly 150 different flower species in a typical meadow. Try asking the typical Brit, young or old, to identify 10 common wildflowers, and I bet the success rate would be in single percentage figures.

Does this matter? This recent human disconnect from the beauty and benefits of our native flora. Can you identify the flower below?

In addition, the hugely varied plant tapestries described in the Romanian meadows were thrilling. Often as many as 50 different species of grass and flowers can be found within a single square metre of meadow turf. How do our gardens compare with such intermingling richness? Who would dare to, or indeed succeed in, cramming so many plants into such a small area? And with no supplementary fertilisers! But this concept of intermingling and self-seeding plants where no one form is sufficiently vigorous or dominant to outcompete its neighbours is surely the clue to a naturalistic effect within a garden. Unlike the vastly more frequent clearly defined block of a bit of this, next to a bit of that. In a much more manicured way, such simple plant intermingling was what really struck us all those years about some of the formal plantings at Monet’s garden at Giverny, and provided the impetus for our own journey into impressionistic planting trials. A few of our current effects are shown below to illustrate how tricky it can be to achieve anything to match simply nature’s ways ……

And just now our biggest realised mistake was to allow some of the taller Geranium cultivars (unlike the short one above) in the impoverished rocky substrate of our man-made Magic Terrace garden. They are simply too tall and early into vigorous growth thus swamping their shorter companions. So right now, Fiona has with huge effort been ripping them out, and we shall use the more benign Erodium manescavii as a more refined and less invasive alternative. At last, I’ve raised enough seedlings as replacements.

The Transylvanian hay meadow flower diversity supports, not surprisingly, a hugely vibrant and diverse insect and higher animal fauna, and in large part, it still exists because the terrain is too steep for reseeding and mistrust from the farmers (and the cost) of artificial fertilisers means that many meadows have developed their own ‘natural’ floral patina over centuries of such literally hands-on management, using heirloom simple wooden tools to gently shift the hay around after manual scything.

Our own future King, HRH Prince Charles, has created a little section of Transylvanian-type meadow at his Highgrove garden, (click here), and is keen to help support this fragile habitat, currently under threat as the appeal of such ‘primitive and impoverished’ rural living in an increasingly progressive Romania wanes amongst the younger generation.

You can even book a holiday at a cottage that Prince Charles owns in the area to explore this very special environment. Click here for the link.

But closer to home HRH Prince Charles has also been passionate about preserving the UK’s old hay meadows. It’s often quoted that 97% of traditional hay meadows have been lost from the UK in recent years, and last year as a project to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s coronation, he established the Coronation Meadows initiative.

Click here for a link to the Carmarthenshire page of the website. The simple aim was to establish a nationwide collection of traditional meadows which could be visited by the public, enjoyed, and be potential plant and seed refuges for this type of once common habitat. Since our local meadow at Cae Blaen-Dyffryn was only about 20 minutes away and is described as having the greatest population of butterfly orchids in Wales, we thought we should visit

Locating it was tricky, and there is no easy nearby parking place but walking back along the road from where we managed to sneak the car off a right-angled bend brought us to a, for now benignly uninspiring, 9 acre plot set quite high up in the hills to the South of Lampeter. (Possibly a little higher than our own 800 feet above sea level High Meadow). But looking more closely, the telltale signs of plant diversity revealed themselvesThe white flowers of Pignut, fringing the small Hawthorns, Yellow rattle’s crinkly leaved upright stems pushing up everywhere fulfilling its vital grass weakening hemi-parasitic role, along with the lower growing pink flowered Lousewort. And every so often the tell-tale glossy bulb like leaves, some spotted, of the orchids. We shall revisit in a few weeks for a more exciting floral vista

But interestingly this meadow is managed by the Plant Life charity, and its acquisition was sponsored, I notice from the information board, by Timotei shampoo. And this gives a clue as to why such meadows are now so rare that some Coronation Meadows are simply roadside verges – simply no areas of representative meadow fields remained within those county borders.

It is an expensive, weather-affected, and labour-intensive option to go the annual hay crop route, with no use of artificial fertiliser. So for much commercial agriculture, the practice has been abandoned. Reseeding with more vigorous and productive varieties of grass has been the norm, heavy grazing or earlier cutting for silage, and much application of artificial fertiliser. The flowers rapidly disappear, as does the dependent fauna.

Carmarthenshire is indeed fortunate in retaining many traditional small upland hay meadows. In part perhaps because they are managed by smallholder hobby ‘farmers/stewards’, which indeed best summarises our status. But driving back from Cae Blaen Dyffryn along the tiny lanes to the East of Gelli confirmed another more recent threat to such meadows

Forestry. In a little-known initiative, the Welsh Assembly Government has created a plan to plant 5,000 hectares of new woodland every year for the next 20 years. Read more (click here), and it appears that the aim is for such new woods to be placed on steep, and currently under-managed land. But barely a mile from us, on perfectly level, and historically meadow-type pastures, the trees have gone in.

At least broad-leaved species have been used. Though how well the many obvious ash seedlings will fare is open to debate. Driven, I guess, by significant grants for planting together with low management costs over many years, for some farmers this may be an economically attractive option. I understand that this particular development has been made by an absentee landlord. Which therefore probably makes perfect financial sense. But how to save the hay meadows?

Throughout the UK, environmental stewardship schemes help to support wildlife sympathetic farming practices, but apparently only the Higher Level Stewardship schemes are likely to encourage farmers to retain hay meadows as a financially viable option. Click here for more discussion on such schemes in England. And there simply isn’t enough money in the kitty to have a significant effect. So it does seem that the survival of many of the remaining hay meadows, certainly in this part of the world, will depend on enthusiastic stewards who see a value over and above any commercial decisions in maintaining this natural/man-made almost symbiotic ecology, for personal and perhaps shared long term aesthetic and wildlife benefits.

The above view from last July (note the still large beige areas devoid of living vegetation, simply killed by fallen over rank grass from the previous season) shows how well the meadow has greened up with self-sown plants in just a year. The image below is from mid-May 2014. I’ll repeat the image later this year to show the extent of mid-season flowers

So our High Meadow is already being transformed, and recreated from its flower barren intensively grazed earlier existence with more flowers than ever this year, and the yellow rattle at last is establishing in local pockets throughout the turf.

Our lower and much wetter meadows which support a different range of wildflowers has presented much more of a challenge with extensive rush overgrowth. Throughout the UK rushes seem to have benefited from the wetter and generally milder conditions of recent years, and present a real management challenge. Click here for an interesting insight into potential solutions… … Last September, above…

… (Late May 2014, after 1 spring cut and 3 weeks post spraying with a selective herbicide) …

Simply cutting, or even heavy grazing, is unlikely to limit their progress, and rather like our Geranium cultivars in the garden, they are a dominant plant species, out competing pretty much anything else. So after much deliberation we have opted this spring to apply a selective weedkiller to the worst sections of our lower meadows, following on from last year’s autumnal, and then an early spring, cut using our BCS 615SL Powerscythe.

Several reports seem to endorse rush control in this way as a necessary evil, to achieve diversity going forward. Click here for a link on the status of Welsh Hay Meadows, by the charity Flora locale. And click here for a project to restore hay meadow diversity funded by the English Utility company United Utilities. (Interestingly, Transylvania has a very different climate to West Wales with just a third of our annual rainfall, and predictable hotter summers, so my guess is that rushes do not present the same issues there).

The decision to use a herbicide was made easier by an imminent change in legislation. As from 2015, it will no longer be permissible to purchase any agricultural plant protection chemicals without first obtaining a certificate of competence in its application. You will need a different certificate for different means of application.

So for us it would require a course at an approved centre, then registration to complete a test, and then taking an exam which would hopefully result in a certificate of competence.

To use a knapsack sprayer.(Let alone a walking stick weed wiper – probably a punishable offence…)

The cost of all this would be well over £450, excluding the travel costs, plus possible overnight accommodation.

The cost of the selective weedkiller sufficient to treat several acres of rushes is currently about £45.

It seems to me likely that very few smallholders would contemplate shelling out this sum. So what would the options be going forward, if you have a rush problem? Presumably the ‘powers that be’ anticipate we would call in a suitably qualified contractor to apply the chemical. But one of the things we’ve learned here, is that any weather dependent task may have very limited windows of opportunity to be successfully completed. In the case of rush treatment it needs to be applied early in the year-ideally late April/May when there is vigorous new rush growth above surrounding foliage, and you need at least 12 hours without rain after application for optimum success. Even with good weather forecasts, you might only know on the morning thattoday is the best time to spray.

Now ring your contractor, and get him to come within a couple of hours, along with all those other smallholders ??

And in our case vehicle access to the fields is inappropriate for much of the year. They are just too soggy. The 2 wheeled BCS 615 SL power scythe scores highly here, being much lighter than either ATV/Quad bike or even worse a tractor and equipment, so little surface damage is created after just a few days without rain.

So I’m guessing that even if chemical control was thought to be a reasonable option, in future it will simply not be practical or financially viable. Inevitably there is short term disturbance of the fauna, after cutting and spraying, but I still managed last week to take this distant image of a pair of cuckoos which have used the electricity supply lines across the lower meadow every year as a convenient perch to survey the field below, for possible meals, or host nests. (And 2 hours after publishing this, F and I stood close to this spot for 15 minutes whilst the midge clouds gathered, watching the female cuckoo move from wire vantage point to the tops of each of the piles of rushes, and with remarkable efficiency systematically shifting around the field, barred beneath like a sparrowhawk, no doubt hoping to spot a potential host nest for it’s egg. Come again next year, cuckoo, and we hope the field will be even more inviting…)  

I’ll update in future years just how successful (or not!) our attempts at managing these fields have been. For now, we have grass returning, wild flowers have already colonised the ditches very well so we have plenty of nearby seed to reintroduce, and for the first time in the 20 years that we have owned the property, the fields actually look like damp meadows, rather than rush mono-cultures. Maybe we shall manage to leave these fields to future owners in better nick than when we took over stewardship?

Perhaps in a few years it may even be possible to take off a hay crop. And of course the last thing we wanted to do was disturb the soil structure or surface by ploughing or rotavating since this would certainly bring a huge number of viable rush seeds to the surface. As in Transylvania, left un-managed such fields either become rush infested or move beyond that stage to wet willow sand birch sumps.  A nearby meadow is managed in alternative fashion by an annual burn off in early spring. No grazing ever takes place here, but here the near mono-culture has become one of very tall coarse tussock forming grasses – seen below last week with early season lush regrowth…

From 27/06/2014:

The wonderful hot sunny weather at this time of the year inevitably means 2 tasks occupy much of out time. (Sadly not, as recent garden visitors suggested, sitting on our various garden seats sipping glasses of wine!).

Shearing and hay making. As an amateur shearer the results are best described as patchy, and my lack of practice makes me very slow, but fortunately we have patient sheep who can see beyond the experience, to the relief of a cooler summer ahead. Prompted by an amusing and timely birthday card this year from Fiona’s mother, I opted to try sitting down to shear, and this worked surprisingly well in sparing further back issues, which I guess are the bane of any slow shearer.

My previous post went into some detail on meadow management and as often seems to happen, no sooner had I read and written about Romanian hay making traditions, than Fiona returned with a leaflet picked up in the local shop about traditional wooden hay making tools. A fascinating phone call ensued with Simon Bowden, who it transpired lives a few miles away, but had the distinction of winning the quality class at last year’s UK hand scything competition in Dorset. As well as coppiced willow plant supports, Simon makes hay forks (second from left below) and hay rakes, from selected willow osier stems which he cultivates. Simon can be reached on 07792 236817.  Fiona had previously sourced a wooden hay rake elsewhere, but we arranged to pick up one of Simon’s hay forks just in time…The revelation is that it is significantly lighter than a pitchfork, and ergonomically shaped with slight bends at the base and prongs, to make tossing hay much less onerous, with a lovely touch of a penny piece used as a rivet, where the single wand is split into three…

The casual observer might question the advantage. But manual hay working is a repetitive, and laborious process … (… so reducing the weight of the tool is a huge plus, as F demonstrates above, and below…)

Though leavened by working in glorious weather, with stunning views…

And it was as I moved across the slope with wheeling Red Kite overhead, and the cuckoo still calling in the valley, as the sssshhhhhhhssssshhhhh whisper of dry light long grass stems studded with dessicated golden buttercups and pink sorrel seeds, was gathered and tossed or flicked over, that I wondered about how few folk will ever have experienced this simple pleasure? How would you describe that unique sound of dry hay on wooden fork, over baked ground? Or the smell?

Do get in touch if you’d like to experience it next year. Many hands certainly make lighter work!

But a couple of phone calls later secured some willing helpers for this year. Neighbouring smallholders who like us have a requirement for limited hay for winter fodder joined us and we’re really grateful to Dave, Avril, Theresa and Graham for helping us turn, fill and then share about 150 big bags of wonderful sweet smelling hay. Though we all seemed to work out own way of how we managed the task …

And when it all got a bit hot and tiring, we retreated to the cool of the Gegin and lots of tea, biscuits, cake and jovial banter…

Interestingly no one seems to manufacture a small hay baling machine which could be drawn behind an ATV, so the Big Bags are for us a convenient way of storing and man handling the bulky finished material. The slope of the field precludes larger conventional hay making machinery, and at least for this year, I was able to skirt round particularly flower rich areas of pasture with the BCS power scythe to allow subsequent seed collection for spreading around the rest of the meadow, and perhaps our lower meadows too. We also now know  from Glyn, the previous owner, that the steep slope together with the fact that the field used to have a track going through it spared it from ever being ploughed or reseeded. Which probably explains why we’re making such progress in returning it to a flowery state. Other recent visitors bemoaned the fact that much of their surrounding pasture has been improved and is now a uniformly ‘P********* Green.’ …the white stars of Lesser Stitchwort light up the understorey…… whilst evening sun illuminates the scene before cutting…

As light relief from this toil we returned to our local wild flower Coronation meadow ( not it seems a hay meadow) at Cae Blaen Dyffryn, where a variety of spotted and butterfly orchids were indeed blooming in profusion. But photographically it proved tricky to get an image that did justice to the splendour of this upland scene as the sun moved round behind a line of beech trees to the West of the meadow. …(notice how much less dense the grass is in this meadow, than our own High Meadow)

From 19/07/2014:

From 7/09/2014:

I thought that this concluded ant swarm events for 2014, having had the first obvious swarm event of black ants at the more usual time of the end of July, whilst hay making. However I happened to wander into our High meadow 3 days ago when the Yellow Meadow Ant, Lasius flavus, had decided that NOW was the right time to swarm. Swarming of most ant species is usually very tightly linked to favourable weather conditions, so that predators are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of above ground insects energing from multiple nests, and the winged form of the ants have the best chance to mate with genetically different groups, and disperse to set up new colonies. Even so, the mortality of young female queens is huge, though still not enough to dent the fact that the biomass of all the world’s ants currently exceeds that of all humans. But since queens can remain active egg layers for up to 15 years, only the odd one needs to survive to ensure species success…Lasius flavus are the most common ant hill forming species of meadow ants in the UK. Very large above ground nests can form over years, (about a litre of soil per year is shifted above ground, giving a hint at an ant hill’s age),  but the ants themselves are rarely seen above ground. Unlike many other ant species, they rely on a symbiotic relationship with a very small number of species of root feeding aphids, kept in special chambers below the soil surface in the nests. The ants eat some of the weaker aphids as a protein source, and also eat the aphid’s sugary excretions as a carbohydrate source, within a mini ant created environment managed with almost agricultural like husbandry efficiency. And by so doing, create unique beneficial effects on the surrounding soil and vegetation.Click here and here for more.

Our largest ant hill was covered with mainly winged virgin queens, slowly making their way up the tallest grass stems…There were far fewer obvious winged males around, and even the occasional much smaller and wingless worker ant…But none of the queens seemed to be flying. Had I missed this? Were all the queens already mated, since this was quite late in the day? Maybe this is why I saw so few winged males, since mating is so violent that the male ant dies almost immediately afterwards. Click here for a bit more on basic ant anatomy.

There were even some queens without wings which were already starting to make attempts to dig underground to establish new colonies. In some species the wings snap off, sometimes they are chewed off, since they would clearly be unnecessary impediments for the rest of their lives spent below ground…I can see that a new field of interest could be opening up for me, to burrow into in more detail later (2 burrowing queens below) …

The following day, the same ant hill scene was completely ant free.

The annual mating ritual was completed.

From 27/09/2014:

Whilst clearing  a section of one of our lower meadow ditches a couple of weeks back, I’d spotted a joined pair of red and yellow dragonflies dipping repeatedly along the narrow peaty ditch for egg laying. I was interested that the pair stayed linked for this – straightened out from the wheel configuration of copulation, but with the upper male seemingly in control of the flying, whilst the lower female hammered her ovipositor beneath the surface at appropriate points. Needless to say I didn’t have my camera with me, so the following day after collecting a couple of eggs from the poultry and placing them in my shorts for safe keeping, I picked up the camera and ditching hoe and headed back down for another hour or so of ditching effort. A Small Copper butterfly appeared, always a delight…With the sun rising, and the sweat falling I headed for the upper pond to see what Dragonflies were still around.

Have you ever tried photographing a Dragonfly?

Some species are cooperative and spend significant amounts of time resting and basking on the ground or low vegetation.These are fairly easy to photograph provided you remember 3 important points. Wear dull clothing (certainly not white tops), approach slowly, and ensure that your shadow doesn’t fall across them as you get close.But what about those majestic patrolling large dragonflies, that actually confront you close up, and clatter their wings audibly, as you enter their sphere of airborne supremacy? They do hover, but move so fast that my digital SLR and basic lenses have never succeeded in capturing an in flight image. So I opted for the Camcorder, with a more powerful zoom, but lower quality…

The problem with using this is the delayed shutter release when operating it in still capture mode. So I hoped for at least a few usable images if I took enough in the first place. But after crouching for several minutes to get the right angle to capture an insect against a background where it would be more visible, my knees complained, so I opted to lie on one side on the still slightly dewy damp grass.Much more comfortable, and easier for my hands  to hold the camera still, and basically wait for a patrolling dragonfly to fly within the general area of where the camera was pointing. Click the shutter, and hope.

Another quarter of an hour or so, and I reckoned I’d maybe got one or 2 shots where the dragonfly was actually photographed in the frame. (Only later on screen was I able to work out what some of the species were… Common Darter -male and female, Black Darter and Southern Hawker).

Even better, I’d witnessed one of the large patrolling dragonflies zoom in on, and clatter aggressively into, a mating pair of smaller dragonflies, right in front of me at the pond’s margin. But was this fleeting moment captured in any clarity? It all happened so fast. Actually it wasn’t bad…you can see below the green/black/blue Southern Hawker attacking the back of the arched red male Common Darter, which is grasping the olive female Common Darter behind its head …

About half an hour later I was washing up, having climbed back to the house, and thought I must have splashed some water onto my shorts, since my right thigh was feeling wet. The day was warm, so I wasn’t too worried, but a few minutes later I realised that the damp patch was getting bigger, and liquid was trickling down my leg. The penny still hadn’t dropped, but once I’d put my hand in the short’s pocket and felt the broken shell, and seen the yellowy mess on my fingers, I remembered the eggs…

From 26/04/2015:

Finally just before the predicted rain materialised at last, I began selective weed wiping of soft rush in our wet valley bottom meadows.

I was encouraged to hear from a professional manager of small meadows and wilder terrain at the CMG meeting, that there are conditions when she has to resort to chemical use to manage certain weeds. Our own experience is that without a selective weed killer, our fields would still be shoulder high rush mono culture. So using a small window wiper with terry nappy wrapped around for extra absorbency, I set to work, with 2 sessions of tedium ahead of me?  …The key is selective wiping, not spraying which would take out all the interesting wild flowers which are beginning to re emerge. So after about 4 hours worth of slow walking of the ditches, through about 7 acres, and then the upper pond field, I had all the emerging new soft rush growth covered. The regrowth in the fields themselves needs a little more growth before wiping – ideally 4 to 5 inches above grass level. This whole selective, though time consuming process uses minimal chemical.

And is this ludditic effort worth it? Absolutely, when the slash of a close range Goldcrest’s punk hair do grabs your attention from the lower branches of a grown from seed Dawn Redwood …

… and then you find a new flowering plant colonising the basal peat of those simple ditches that we dug out last autumn, and I wrote about in ‘As Dull as Ditch Water’ (Click here for details).

I later identified it as Round-leaved Crowfoot (Ranunculus omiophyllus). I’m guessing that seeds had lain dormant in the peat for decades, waiting for exposure and light to burst into action. I’m sure many more new discoveries await us in the years ahead in this meadow.And after being lulled by the backdrop low trilling of a grasshopper warbler, unseen nearby, spot a little brown flash from the side of a South facing ditch bank, topped with emerging bluebells and on closer inspection, at ankle level, discover a small nest complete with a clutch of 4 tiny buff cream, flecked eggs. Possibly a warbler’s nest? Or Chiif Chaff? I’m afraid my bird identification skills are very limited. But how’s this for camouflage? Concentrate on the small vertical fern leaf centre bottom…

We had to ask Dave to confirm that a nest Fiona inadvertently exposed when clearing a rampant honeysuckle from the wire netting support for a rose was occupied by a song thrush, (which apparently are much rarer in these parts than their Mistle thrush cousins).At the time of first discovery it contained 3 of the most gorgeous blue turquoise eggs with black flecks. Fiona added some temporary additional greenery to one side, and the eggs hatched a few days later, but when I checked this morning, the ever present magpies, jays or carrion crows must have raided – the hen had left, and the nest was bare, revealing the superbly smooth mud lined bowl.

And of added interest, though perhaps not the best choice of adornment if one were wanting to conceal a nest, were these bright pink seeds, worked into the mossy external wall. Crocosmia perhaps? Or Euonymus? Any other ideas? And why include them? Are thrushes colour blind?

And finally the last week has seen 2 more spring marker events. On the 22nd, the first male Orange-tip butterfly was spotted in the garden, pausing on it’s favoured Aubretia for a fuel stopand then last night, the 26th, the much anticipated first Cuckoo of 2015 was heard in the valley.

__________

May15th 2017:

Every year sees changes in our upper hay meadow.This year, one of the most obvious has been the expansion of range within the meadow of the pretty pink flowered perennial native Lousewort, Pedicularis sylvatica, which has now become really well established, from an initial small scattering of seed, collected from a friend’s local meadow, just 4 years ago.This hemi-parasite has been a really popular early season nectar flower with at least 3 different species of bumblebees visiting these flowers, which are borne over many weeks, from early April.With the first flowers of annual Yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, opening this year by May 9th, it dovetails very nicely, to give a much longer, reliable nectar supply for these tough native pollinators.

But how do these plants fit into the ecology of meadows?

I struggled to find much about studies on Lousewort interactions with roots, although I did discover that both the genus Pedicularis, of which there are several hundred species worldwide, many in China, and Rhinathus have recently been switched from the Scrophulariaceae and into the Orobanchaceae, or Broomrapes. Broomrapes generally are obligate parasites – lacking any chlorophyll, and so are entirely dependent upon penetrating other green plant root systems and obtaining their nutrition by stealing it from them.

In this aspect of basic physiology, Lousewort seems very like Yellow rattle, both being hemi-parasitic. They both contain chlorophyll, so can photosynthesise and manufacture carbohydrates in their own leaves, but can still penetrate other plants’ root systems to obtain certain nutrients from them. Much work has been done on Yellow rattle, since as many will know, it’s frequently recommended as an aid to restoration of wildflower meadows, by reducing the vigour of otherwise dominant grasses. Indeed this is why we first imported local seeds of yellow rattle onto our meadow about 5 years ago.

However, my first recent discovery was that it doesn’t parasitise just grasses, but a range of more than 50 different potential host plant species, all of which might be found in a typical meadow – though it’s not apparently capable of damaging any native orchid species.

It does this by developing its own root system on germination of the overwintered seed in spring, and this root system then develops special structures designed as transfer organs, called haustoria (single – haustorium), which connect the host and parasite root tissues. The haustorium surrounds the host root, crushes the outer layers, and then forms a penetration peg, to tap into the host’s xylem channels which distribute fluids and nutrients up through the host’s tissues. Once it has done this successfully, secondary xylem channels develop and the parasitic rattle root can then begin the process of sucking out fluids, and more particularly nutrients including carbon and nitrogen from the host. It does this by having higher transpiration rates, in turn because the stomata or pores on the leaves of the rattle are relatively insensitive to water loss. So the water potential of the parasite tissues is kept below that of the host, and creates an effective gradient which ensures materials flow in one direction – away from the host and into the Yellow rattle. A botanical leech, if you will.

But this clearly sophisticated process of attack doesn’t work equally well on all the plant species which Yellow rattle will attack.

Meadow swards, being the diverse communities that they are, allow a single small rattle plant to have simultaneous links into up to 7 different plants at the same time – and remember this is an annual plant which only has a few months to grow, flower, set seed and then die. Grasses and legumes like the trefoils, seem to be its most useful hosts whereas many other dicotyledenous flowering plants (or forbs) can be attacked, but have developed quite sophisticated defence mechanisms.

Quite recent work has shown that in some plants, like the Ribwort or Lanceolate plantain, Plantago lanceolata, this defence entails hypersensitive host cell death at the point of  attempted penetration by the rattle’s haustoria. Essentially the plantain’s root cells are intentionally sacrificed and killed, by the plantain itself, at an early stage of interaction with the rattle’s attack, so that the rattle root can never form a viable peg penetration into the plantain’s xylem system, and so the attempted sap sucking attack fails, even before it’s begun. Though at what cost to the plantain?This year I’ve noticed a few plantains in our meadow which seem very aetiolated. Are these plants which have suffered so much root damage from this defence strategy that their own viability has been affected? Or is something else completely unrelated affecting them? I just don’t know.

In Ox-eye daisies, Leucanthemum vulgare, the plant’s defense is different and involves sealing off the attacking peg of the rattle’s haustorium with lignin, to completely prevent penetration of its xylem. A wooden wall, hastily built within the daisies’ root tissues, to repel invaders. No time to bluster, or tweet, or raise funds. Just detect the threat, and respond.

It clearly is a battlefield beneath the soil’s surface.

All of this suggests one would expect variation within a meadow of the impact of Yellow rattle, in part depending on the actual range of plant species present in different areas of sward. Some more recent work has also looked at the impact of genetic variation within populations of Yellow rattle itself, to try to explain the quantified difference in impact of Yellow rattle on some meadows where it’s been introduced. In one study, grass biomass suppression, induced by adding rattle seeds, ranged from a small 8% to a whopping 84%, whilst at the same time, the abundance of forbs increased by anything between a miserly 5% to an impressive 57%.

The concept of the impact of community genetics is a new one to me, but makes empirical sense, having observed the variability in spread of Yellow rattle in our own, and other meadows. In our case our source seed was from a local meadow in which rattle seemed to be quite a dominant force, and I’ve probably layered on an anthropogenic genetic shift by consciously hand harvesting and scattering saved seed from just the earliest flowering, and therefore seeding, plants in the meadow. For the first 2 years, until the plant became so widely distributed that hand scattering was unnecessary. This was motivated by our need to cut the meadow in stages, sometimes quite early in the season, since we currently do mainly manual hay making, so it’s impossible to clear the field in one session. We have to pace ourselves.

And this is just considering the impact of rattle genetic variation. A lab study involving parasitism of 4 different strains of barley showed big variations in how much the same strain of Yellow rattle impacted on the different barley strains’ productivity, and indeed how the different parasitised barleys created bigger, or smaller, and therefore more fecund in terms of seed production, Yellow rattle plants.

Over just a few years, our meadow has now morphed to a majority of Sweet vernal grass flowers, Anthoxanthum odoratum, at this time of the year. Does it have greater resistance to Yellow rattle? Or just thrive better, since it’s quicker off the mark in spring? We don’t know and we’re not complaining, since it’s this plant more than any other, that gives meadow hay its fantastic scent.

Add in the impacts from mycorrhizal and other fungi which are also key beneath-ground components of a meadow, linking up plant roots and involved in mineral and nutrient exchanges, and one begins to understand that never mind how complex a diverse hay meadow might seem visually above ground, what’s going on below the surface is truly mind boggling in its complexity.If I took one message away from this brief foray into what is clearly now a hot area of research, it is that genetic diversity within plant populations in a meadow is a very good thing for long term species viability. Given the now extremely diminished and fragmented distribution of such wildflower hay meadow communities, perhaps there are great benefits in the intentional local exchange of seed material between meadow owners, to help maintain such species genetic diversity, and consequent species resilience. In the past, the natural wandering of sheep, with their seed carrying fleeces, as well as other animal movements, would have ensured such seed spreading was a constant, low frequency process, and plant populations made up from those individuals best suited to local growing conditions, would have slowly evolved.

One final point. A recent review article by Ken Thompson, referenced a pan European study highlighting just how variable germination rates for seeds like Yellow rattle were, when obtained across Europe from commercial suppliers. Apparently 3 out of 17 samples of rattle contained no viable seeds! In addition, many samples were contaminated with other species, which highlights the advantages of hand collected and locally sourced seeds, when it comes to adding species, or extending genetic diversity, in our native hay meadows.

___

31/05/2017

Waves have gripped me over the last fortnight.

Made me stand and gaze. And wonder.

Not those which batter our nearby coasts, crashing on rocky cliffs, or transporting drifting fleets of jelly fish, as seen recently near Cwmtydu.But those that transform our hay meadow above the house at this time of the year, as the Sweet vernal-grass, Anthoxanthum odoratum, stems reach for the sky.When the winds pick up, it transforms a flat scene of subtle colour variations, into an active rippling floral plateau. The inflorescences of millions of grass plants in a show of spectacular synchronised dancing, with the gusting, pulsing wind ripping up over contoured hills and warmed from the South, as the master choreographer.

How do I describe the colours of this scene? It depends on the light. And the angle of view. And the time of day. And how developed the grass “flowers” are.Early on, and it’s all preparatory greens, then the anthers develop, extend, and let it all hang out and add a grey, or is that a purple, or purple brown, or rust, or white, or yellow colour to the mix?I read that Sweet vernal-grass, Anthoxanthum odoratum, (yellow scented anthers?) above, isn’t that palatable for grazing stock, (click here for more information on upland native plant grazing preferences), but our native Tor ddu sheep seem to manage it, and since it’s now the predominant grass in this meadow, post Yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, introduction, that’s just as well.

And what about the appropriate technical language for describing grasses? I found an excellent simple guide by Jean Turner which you can access by clicking here. This gives much of the terminology used to describe grass morphology – quite different to many of the words familiar to descriptions of our garden flowers.There are Culms, and Stolons, and Tillers to describe the leafy parts of the plant.

And Lemma, Palea, Glumes, Lodicules and Spikelets – words completely novel to me – to describe many of the features of the individual grass flowers. After all, grasses being wind pollinated have no need for showy coloured petals or sepals to attract pollinating insects, they just have to hang out their anthers and let that same choreographing wind disseminate, and waft clouds of dust like pollen grains, from one bending plant to another.

I’d never thought much about grass stem, or more correctly culm, rigidity, before these latest displays. Then I happened to grab a couple of grass culms growing just outside the back door, on the steep bank. And looked a bit closer at their physical structure.

There were the obvious nodes, which usually contain a central cross wall (or septum) at right angles to the culm, and internode sections, which seemed to vary in length as the grass reached the flowering spikelets. The diameter of the stem also seemed to vary considerably, tapering at its tip but being essentially circular, at least in Sweet vernal- grass, throughout its length. However the thickened node is clearly a key component with considerable extra strength which plays a role in giving the grass flexibility to withstand wind damage, in its springtime growth spurt.

Little research seems to have been carried out on the mechanical strength of hollow grass culms, and their septate nodes. However studies by Karl Linklas demonstrated that hollow stems can grow about 25 % taller than solid stems, for a given biomass. But a problem arises as internode (stem) length increases – the hollow stems become much more prone to permanent damage causing the stem to fall over, when stressed with side forces such as strong winds (such collapsing of tall grasses even has its own word – lodging). All such circular hollow structures begin to ovalise, as they bend under such forces, and once a critical point is reached, then irreparable damage and crimping occurs. It seems that the nodes with their cross walls tolerate much greater forces, and can flex in strong winds, allowing sufficient ‘give’ in taller grass culm heights.

In one of Nicklas’ papers, he even demonstrates that perforating the integrity of the cross wall of the node, with a tiny needle, diminishes its strength by about 35%. He proposes that the nodes act as springs, storing energy when the stem is flexed, and releasing it once the bending strain dissipates. (Click here for more.). A great example of hugely sophisticated adaptive design, in something as simple as a meadow grass trying to survive and reproduce in a demanding environment.

What controls the development of the grass as it grows into these specialised structures is something I’ll return to shortly, but firstly I must record that a meadow full of flowering grasses becomes a haven for a huge invertebrate population. Best appreciated as the sun sets, and with a hat to shield me from the still strong direct light, bending low and looking uphill, one can appreciate the thousands of insects caught, contra-jour, above the shimmering meadow. Pinpricks of mobile transluscence, shifting above the swaying stems. A bat and swallow haven.

_________

June 20th 2017

Whether I’ve just noticed it this year, or whether there is actually moreof it, as our meadow continues to morph into a more diverse, floriferous and open ecosystem, I’m not sure. But this year has seen masses of cuckoo spit appearing on the stems of various plants in the meadows and garden. As most will know, this appears around the time that our Cuckoo’s song is diminishing as June progresses, and is the protective spittled shroud, produced by the larval form of the Common froghopper, Philaenus spumarius.

A by product of the sap extracted from the plant stems, which the larvae feed upon, it seems to be an extremely effective protective strategy, hiding it from potential predators and also protecting the juvenile form from dessication.

I don’t yet have an image of the adult to include, but it’s a remarkable insect which can spring a distance of 70 cm or so into the air – higher even than the flea, and with an extraordinary acceleration of 400 G. Or as another way of viewing this, a change of velocity as it springs into the air of 4,000 metres per second, per second (4,000m/sec squared).

To put this into perspective, astronauts are trained to withstand a force of 9 G – ordinary people would black out at forces greater than 5 G. To read a little more about how they manage to achieve this extraordinary feat, by using their long legs as catapults, and how they might even control the direction of their leaps into the unknown, click here. Which indeed is the noise you might hear if you disturb a frog hopper on a leaf stem, and it springs away from you, leaving you to marvel at such jumping finesse.

Achieved with no training.

No special fitness diets.

And no competitive targets. (As far as we know).

Simply a very efficient survival strategy honed over millions of generations and years.

The first hay has been cut in the last few days, in soaring temperatures and day long sunshine. The Red kites fly low and close, roving shadows appearing over my shoulder as I concentrate on guiding the power scythe, inspecting for cut-kill. Though one of the benefits of a small scale slow cutter, such as I use, is that collateral amphibian damage is very slight – they can easily jump away in time.

And in a valley this year very strangely devoid of lamb calls, as neighbouring farmers have dramatically reduced sheep numbers, in part as the inevitable consequence of ageing demographics, we heard the clear, haunting high burbling cry as a pair of curlews flew overhead last week. The first and only time we’ve heard this in years.

A rare and much appreciated pleasure indeed. Perhaps less intensively grazed fields may boost local numbers with time?Finally, I must record that in our hay meadow, we have moved over the last four years from 1,1, 2 to 14 (2017) and counting, the numbers of Heath spotted orchids we found flowering. This is a huge thrill occurring so soon ( just 5 years), after starting our push to achieve greater floral diversity in this field.

As a galanthophile used to studying the minutiae of flower differences, it’s also interesting to see that they’re all quite unique and distinctive in flower spike size and shape, and individual flower patterning and colour. A few examples are shown below.

Guesses for how many flowers we’ll find next year anyone?

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July 28th 2017

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.

Whilst there have been single sunny days, and some fabulous cloud formations, we’ve once again been forced to cut and process hay in less than optimal conditions, turn it multiple times, and get it off the meadow in a maximum weather window (i.e. no rain falling) of 48 hours.No wonder most farmers round about now cut and process grass into haylage, or silage in plastic wrap sheaths, with the consequent loss of floral and other biodiversity.

Further serious thought about this issue has seen us exploring further small scale mechanisation with a Molon hay turner/windrow maker, which works off our 2 wheel BCS power unit, which we use for cutting the hay with a scythe. Whilst not ideal, this does save a huge amount of physical work particularly with the early turnings when the grass is still very wet.This enabled us to turn the last block of hay on our top field 5 times before stuffing into 55 big bags, and getting it all safely off the field in 48 hours from cutting, before the rain returned.

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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.

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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Posted 30/04/2018

One advantage of the very slow grass growth, and the almost complete absence of slugs in our meadows so far this year (I almost need to repeat this, to remind me of this unique scenario) – clearly a big population crash after this February and March’s extreme freeze drying – is that it’s much easier to scan the turf for signs of new plant species seedlings.

A bank in our upper hay meadow which very early on in our tenure of Gelli Uchaf had the surface soil scraped down with a JCB’s bucket to fill in a track which had zig zagged up through our field, has always been more sparse in grass growth than much of the rest of the field. I guess minimal top soil was left after this process. So this area seemed like a good first place to try to establish some flowering plants, once we started on encouraging floral diversity into these fields.

Beginning 6 years ago with some Dog-violet, Viola riviana, seed capsules collected from our access track’s banks.Over the years other seed including Lousewort, Pedicularis sylvatica, (below).Betony, Stachys officinalis, Great Burnet, Sanguisorba officinalis, (below), Narcissus pseudonarcissus lobularis (the native daffodil), Cowslip, Primula veris, Bugle, Ajuga reptans, Fox and Cubs, Pilosella aurantiaca, Self Heal, Prunella vulgaris, have all been scattered.Then, 3 years ago a friend gave us a few heads of seed capsules of Early purple orchid (Orchis mascula). Although collected from her woodland about 5 miles away, I thought I’d give them a go on this slope, since it’s part of the hay meadow where waxcap mushrooms appear in the late summer and autumn. I simply crushed the small seed pods and tried to then shake the incredibly fine dust like seed onto this part of the meadow slope.

I’ve written before about orchid seed germination, click here for more detail, but I’ll summarise the critical point, which is why I mention the waxcaps, below.

Very fine orchid seed will land on potentially suitable sites, but in most cases the seeds will be inactive until the following spring, by which time rains and physical actions will have moved them into the leaf litter, or upper soil layers. Here, fungal hyphae – those thread-like structures that form a network or mycelium, send tiny outgrowths which either penetrate the case of the embryo itself, or the very tiny root the embryo is capable of starting with its own very limited stored food reserves. The fungus then very quickly establishes microscopic structures resembling balls of tagliatellae within the orchid’s individual cells. From these structures, also known scientifically as pelotons, nutrients and more specifically Carbon and Nitrogen, are passed from the fungus to the orchid, allowing it to develop and grow. Click here and here, for some great scientific papers with more detail on what is clearly a very complex symbiotic association.

Without these fungal pelotons, the orchid seed will never be able to develop.

With time, the orchid, thanks to its fungal support system, is able to develop roots of its own, and eventually a primitive storage organ called a protocorm, beneath the soil. When this is large enough, and this may take a few years, the orchid can finally make its own leaves, and appear above ground, and eventually become large enough to flower. At the same time many species produce swollen root like structures resembling testicles, and this accounts for the ‘orchid’ name chosen to describe this, one of the 2 largest plant families in the world with around 25,000 species. Once an above ground photosynthesising plant develops, the orchid may even pay the fungus back for its generous help, by passing some of its own carbohydrate products of photosynthesis, back to the fungus. 

After spotting multiple small clusters of Betony leaves (above) on the slope, imagine my delight when I found some darkly spotted glossy green leaves which were possibly Orchis mascula. Yesterday I did a more systematic quartering of this slope and counted about 35 different young orchid plants. Some even seem to have tiny flower spikes developing.

A further interesting point is that the main cluster of plants, and they certainly aren’t evenly distributed over the bank being in 3 discrete patches, are at the most South Westerly end, where I definitely recall seeing waxcaps in previous years. Sadly, I can’t find a photo to include, so plan to stake out the locations of the orchids and inspect later in the year to see if they are indeed associated with a particular above ground fungal body presence.

Early purple orchids apparently have one of the most concentrated food stores in their tubers, and sailors used to take them on voyages with them for this reason, in earlier periods.

In addition, before coffee was discovered, the powdered root was ground up and used for brewing a drink with reputed aphrodisiac properties, and special “saloop” or “salep” houses were built for consuming this interesting beverage. How appropriate then for us two emigres from Shropshire (or Salop, as it’s also known) to be growing it in our meadow.

Maybe if it really takes off, we could offer it as an optional drink for garden visitors in the future, along with tea or coffee? Finally, if or when we do get some flowers, they have a scent of honey initially, but this changes to more like an unpleasant tom cat pee aroma, once pollination has taken place. Click here for more on Saloop/Salep.

I’m indebted to the wonderful wildflower.org.uk site for some of these details. Click here for more information and some photos of the flowers.

On the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group website, Andrew Martin has just reviewed a fascinating paper on the benefits to bumblebees of “restoring” hay meadows, click here for link, and in most cases this was achieved by spreading relatively large amounts of green hay from suitable local donor meadows onto “improved, and species poor” grassland sites. It’s interesting that our experience is that simple hand scattering of collected seed can also kick start this process towards floral diversity surprisingly quickly.

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29/05/2018:

The additional dilemma facing us was that we then had an extended forecast period of dry, warm and fairly sunny weather stretching ahead of us. So, I started to cut some hay. The problem is that after the very cool spring, the crop at this time of the year isreallylight. And most plants haven’t produced flowers let alone seed yet. Which is why the strict approach to hay making would be it’s far too early to even think of doing this – many agro-environmental schemes ban cutting any hay fields before early July, to avoid impacting on any ground nesting birds, but there aren’t any of these on our land anyway.

But there is a well-known saying about making hay, when the sun shines.

The Sweet vernal grass, Anthoxanthum odoratum, flower heads are up, rusty brown. The Pignut, Conopodium majus, fronds are unfurling, and Germander speedwell,Veronica chamaedrys, and Lousewort, Pedicularis sylvatica, are in bloom.  Do we wait for more growth, and risk another typically wet July and August? Or start nibbling away, and at least get some hay in the (big) bag? Having cut some on 2 days around midday, around the field edges, my decision seemed justified – this is how cutting hay should be! The stems are actually dry when you cut them – not damp with yesterday’s rain, or heavy with dew, as is usually the norm here. The BCS power scythe blade cut much more cleanly, and didn’t clog once.The other benefit with sequential nibbling is that it’s much easier to manage physically, and some of the flowers will probably recover and flower later in the year. The first Yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, flowers opened last week too, and this is one of the plants I suspect will bounce back from an early trim, and hence extend the season of nectar and pollen for bumblebees later in the year. There are certainly some benefits compared with the conventional radical, cut the field all in one go, which is the normal practice with mechanised hay or silage making these days.

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June 23rd 2018:

 

As well as the Sea campion, I’ve noticed the Silver Y’s on G. macrorrhizum, Yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, in the hay meadow, and even Sweet William, Dianthus barbatus, which we’ve grown for the first time in quantity.

 

 

Not to be out done, our native Garden chafers, Phyllopertha horticola, then exploded with a swarm type mating display.I’d noticed a few in the hay meadow over the previous few days, but was out there early on the morning of June 4th. The lower East facing slope was being warmed by the rising sun and even at 8.00 am the air temperature was hot as I stood and watched as waves of these insects appeared above the Sweet vernal grass, Anthoxanthum odoratum, and Sorrel, Rumex acetosa, seed heads.

 

 

 

The individual beetles would clumsily cling to stems, then fly a few metres, before dropping down and disappearing into the lower grassy thatch as a cloud covered the sun and temperatures dropped slightly.

 

 

 

 

I’ve never seen anything like this before, and neither it seems had our local bird populations, but very quickly robins, house sparrows and a jay, Garrulus glandarius, realised a feast was being laid on and ignored my close presence with the camera to fly down and pick off the beetles as they clattered onto the margins of the meadow where we’d cut and removed a section for hay.

 

 

Apparently garden chafers are viewed as pests, not just because of the root eating activities of the grubs, which I wrote about last year, but also because large numbers of adults, like those I was witnessing, can damage the surface of developing apples and cause significant wastage to an orchard’s crop. The typical signs are small lesions on the fruitlet’s surface, similar to the image below.

 

There’s an interesting recent report from Germany about how funnel traps have been developed to catch the adults and prevent such damage in an orchard environment, click here.  One aspect of this study was what the scientists used to bait the traps to attract the chafers – a mix of volatile plant origin chemicals. This introduced me to a new to me word, kairomone. I guess many readers will be familiar with the word pheromone, which is a chemical produced by a species, and often used as a signalling chemical to alert other individuals of the same species to the presence of the animal which has produced it. Many male moths, for example, locate females pre-mating, by following pheromone scent plumes detected with their ornate branched antennae.

 

 

A kairomone is by definition a chemical emitted by one organism, which mediates interactions between different species in a way that benefits an individual of anotherspecies which receives it, and harms the emitter. So in the case of the garden chafers, the males apparently locate the females by the “scents” of plant-based chemicals which are released by the adult females which have fed on them.

 

Within 24 hours the weather had changed, cloud cover prevailed and the chafers weren’t obvious. In any event most of the mating had probably taken place by then and eggs will have been laid. Presumably in profusion! It’s very difficult to get impressive still or video clips of this scene – the beetles move fast, and cameras tend to focus on the many grass seed heads and stems. Before my video battery ran out, this was the best I could manage

 

 

Given the considerable damage caused last autumn by badgers ripping up turf in this meadow to eat chafer grubs as they matured near the soil surface, I think that I shall have to consider my own form of scent-based deterrence of badgers before they come into our meadow this year, or risk even greater turf damage than in 2017.

 

However a possible benefit of this chafer explosion may be that grasses will be weakened even more over the next 12 months, and allow further flower proliferation in the meadow, already aided by the ongoing presence of Yellow rattle, and now to a lesser extent, Eyebright, Euphrasia spp.

 

 

 

 

Within the meadow, I’ve been delighted how our orchid population has also exploded in numbers this year. Every day new flower spikes seem to appear, mainly in clusters around the field though with 3 or 4 dispersed singletons. As I write the numbers have swelled to 82, extending the exponential annual progression to 1,1,4,14,82. At this rate we’ll hope for well over 100 next year? Most seem to be hybrid forms of the Heath spotted-orchid and Common spotted-orchid, (Dactylorhiza maculata and D. fuchsii) and all have individual variations in both flowering time, colour, flower markings and numbers of flowers per spike. So again I was wrong in my earlier prediction that the spotted leaves I’d seen earlier in the year belonged to Early purple orchids, Orchis mascula! There’s a really good identification guide to the more common orchid species, produced by the Natural History Museum, which you can download as a pdf by clicking here. It’s particularly pleasing that my applications of dried seaweed don’t seem to have negatively impacted on their proliferation and that after worrying that the very first orchid I’d spotted 5 years hadn’t appeared this year, eventually it did, and this time with 3 flower spikes.

 

 

 

I couldn’t find any information on how long terrestrial orchids like these will survive, but having a tuberous root system, maybe quite a few years. The above individual is clearly already 5 years old, plus the time spent as a protocorm before its leaves emerged above ground. So given the increase in numbers recorded in this meadow so far, perhaps we can expect thousands in a few more years, which would be a huge delight!

 

Finally, I must mention that during the late evening of the chafer swarm day, with a still very warm and muggy feel, I nipped out last thing and was worried by the high noise level from the ewes and lambs, who by this time are usually completely silent.

 

 

Checking things out with a torch, I discovered several were extremely restless and vocal beneath the trees of the green lane and soon discovered why. Clouds of midges, worse than anything I have ever experienced here, descended on me in seconds. The poor sheep, recently shorn, probably had a very miserable few days, before the midges, fed and bred, completed their short life cycle.

 

With all this talk of recovery and explosion in numbers, so far the slugs are an exception – their numbers have remained exceptionally low, perhaps limited by the unusually dry conditions.

 

Much fine weather has meant more cuttings of hay, although some required bringing in early in our big bags, and then manual turning again several times after unexpected rain appeared and required bagging up too soon after cutting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wonderful healthy exercise? With the current forecast hinting at another fortnight of dry conditions with stiff breezes, after a lull of a week or so when dank mist and drizzle dominated, more was cut in the last 2 days. We hope we might now manage to complete the year’s harvest by the beginning of July. A uniquely long, summer dry period in our permanent residence at Gelli Uchaf.A single very successful day on the shepherd’s hut build early in the month saw the temporarily fixed roofing sheets come off, the false ribs and purlins cut, the plywood sheets flexed and temporarily fixed for the barrel ceiling, some roof insulation added and the roof sheets lifted back on and screwed down permanently – all completed with minutes to spare before William knocked off for the day. For once a DIY day which exceeded optimistic expectations.

 

 

With daily trips up to the hut to tinker, and now even apply some internal paint, we’re already benefiting from the frequent walks up “Longevity Hill” and the glorious views, including the one below on the longest day of the year.

 

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31/07/2018:

For any meadow owners who’ve had to cut a crop for hay or haylage, it’s clearly been the best year in ages for getting it into a shed or wrapped with no problems, though perhaps quantities are reduced after the cold late spring and then very dry weather from May onwards.

But for anyone who has stock that are grazing their land permanently, there are currently likely to be huge issues with the lack of aftermath regrowth. Our total annual rainfall here, since I began measuring it, has ranged from 1600 to 2150 mm. Monthly maximas from 534 mm in December 2015 downwards. Our previous longest summer dry spell saw 95 mm fall in June and July of August 2014. This year we have had just 89 mm since May 1st.

So I’m sharing some of our experiences this year. We only take a hay crop off part of 2 (out of 6) paddocks – 1 upland sloping, 1 valley bottom wet, which we need for our small flock of Tor Ddu sheep. We do this semi-manually, by cutting with a walk behind BCS Powerscythe, turning mainly now with a mini Molon turner which fits onto the BCS power unit, which also rows the hay up. Although under some conditions manual turning works better.

The hay is then raked and manually stuffed into big bags and dragged off the fields and stored loose in small hay sheds. We’ve found it stores better out of the bags. The manual effort involved in this means, as old fogies, we can never cut more than a small amount in 1 day, since we have to be prepared to make hay in 48 hours, which has been the default maximum time between showers for many recent summers until this summer of 2018.

After experimenting for 5 years, this year we decided to start cutting the peripheral field margins on our upper hay meadow first since this always grow lusher and quicker than the central areas of this field.This began on May 21st. Stock had been kept out from early February. The crop was very light, but conditions were good for haymaking, though some overheated and needed manually re-turning (below) once the typical showers, which weren’t on the forecasts, had been and gone.

In the end we’d got all of our designated hay areas in both fields finished by the last week in June. Way too early for wildflower seed set?

Interestingly, the very early first cut areas behaved as though they’d had a Chelsea chop (in gardening parlance). Since the annual Yellow rattle, Rhinanthus minor, was beheaded before any seed was set, it regrew, flowered and set seed after the main crop in the centre of the field had finished – a great extra resource for nectar seeking insects..

Although the masses of Sweet vernal grass, Anthoxanthum odoratum, which is our primary grass species in the upper meadow, had flowered in the early cut sections, it hadn’t set seed. However, this grass species hasn’t produced much of a second flush of flowers. Instead, the later flowering grasses, (including Common bent, Agrostis capillaris, – though I’m not a grass expert!) have now produced seed heads.Even more surprising was that in one area subjected to an early cut, a single Heath Spotted-orchid,Dactylorhiza maculata, hybrid, survived, flowered and set seed, in spite of such an early assault.The later flowering Greater Bird’s-foot-trefoil, Lotus pedunculatus, has also recovered and is just now producing some flowers and greenery in areas near to the hedges, in spite of the drought.

How do other areas of this meadow look now? Some small sections with the majority of the increasing orchid count.(83 this year, up from just 1 flower, 4 years ago) are still uncut and now straw like in appearance.

The main section of this field cut in late June, (above middle left), and on an East facing slope have almost no grass regrowth at all. But there’s still greenery in this section – the Ribwort plantain, Plantago lanceolata.Dandelions, Taraxacum spp. and Fox-and-cubs, Pilosella aurantiaca.

All with deeper root systems looked slightly stunted but still green. The sorrel, Rumex acetosa, is just beginning to recover too, in this late cut area.Whilst in the earlier cut sections the closely related Sheep’s sorrel, Rumex acetosella, has flowered and set seed.

At some point we’ll need to wean our lambs onto this field, so even with our low stocking density we do need some aftermath grazing. Shifting these meadows towards greater diversity, and cutting early (at least some sections) will definitely have helped overall productivity in the very dry conditions of 2018. In addition, it may have really helped all the invertebrate life which would been more impacted with conventional removal of all the crop at one time.

Obviously, however, this piece-meal approach won’t easily work with larger machinery or with a contractor, but for any with smaller areas, say less than 2 acres, it could be an option to consider.

With the above backdrop I was interested by the recently established trial on increasing diversity in pasture swards by the University of Reading. The Diverse Forages project  began in 2017. By using standardised plots using increasing numbers of species in the seed mixes for newly sown pasture (6,12,17 species), it has a number of targets and measurements:

• Biomass yield, forage quality, botanical composition, and soil properties in a long-term replicated trial plot study at multiple sites

• A comparison of pasture resilience under waterlogged and drought conditions assessed using trial plots

• On-farm case studies from ten demonstration farms in South and South West England

• A two-year evaluation of forage nutritional value, including measurements of digestibility, nitrogen use efficiency, methane emission mitigation potential, and growth rate of grazing cattle

• A modelling exercise to determine economic and environmental impacts of the mixtures at farm-scale.

You can read a review of a discussion workshop of its first year’s results by clicking here.  

This review includes:

“Results from the EU Cost study showed that 98% of the mixed swards tested outperformed the yield of the average component species
sown in monoculture,”

and “The SmartGrass project indicated reduced requirement for
worming lambs fed on multi-species pasture.”

and “described how one dairy farmer growing diverse forages had enabled him to more than double his soil organic matter over a number of years which in turn allowed him
to increase stocking rate.” 

Click here for more detail on the study which will run for 5 years. Although it’s clearly aimed much more at commercial farmers, than a typical CMG member, it may raise awareness of the benefits of sward diversity, and after the 2018 results are available, it may indeed highlight the fact that in extreme weather, having all your fodder eggs in the perennial ryegrass basket is a very dangerous thing to do.

Most readers on this site will of course already be aware of the huge benefits of species diversity in grassland – that’s partly really why CMG exists, but it’s great to see that some hard data on species diversity in pasture may gradually be accumulated and affect mainstream agricultural practice, once a study like this has been completed.

Reinventing the wheel perhaps?

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September 8th 2018:

In the upper hay meadow, the Fox- and-Cubs, or Grim the Collier, or Devil’s Paintbrush, Pilosella aurantiaca, has flowered beautifully in September and has proved to be a magnet for many bumbles, honeybees, wasps, hoverflies and even butterflies.

Forgetting to always carry my camera nearly meant I missed 2 other sightings on these sunny days – a Small heath butterfly, Coenonympha pamphilus, resting on dewy grass, in the same meadow.And even more exciting seeing a Common blue butterfly, Polyommatus icarus, work its way down the bank slope, flitting over the yellow Creeping cinquefoil, Potentilla reptans, and Tormentil flowers, Potentilla erecta, and alighting only on the Bird’s-foot-trefoil, Lotus corniculatus.

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Not to be outdone in the insect friendly flower category of meadow plants recovering from an early hay cut, to bloom in early autumn, the humble dandelion, Taraxacum spp. is at last weedling its way into my consciousness.I remember that when Richard and Kath Pryce did their botanical survey here in 2016, they mentioned dandelion diversity.As I’ve slowly worked my way over the hay meadow this last week, planting Snake’s head fritillary bulbs, Fritillaria meleagris, I’ve started to notice just how variable dandelion flowers are.And their leaves.And probably their seed heads too.Although lacking the diverse insect appeal, at least at this time of the year, that the Fox- and-Cubs has, they’re still loved by hoverflies,and some smaller bumbles, particularly B. pascuorum.I like to think that the increasing numbers of these flowers have helped the B. pascuorum to build up in numbers through the years, and now they form a significant pollinator of the autumn flowering Cyclamen hederifolium in the garden. My last bumblebee survey walk saw me counting 5 different bumbles on the Cyclamen flowers, so seed set should once again be brilliant this year, without me having to stop to wield the pollinating brush.

But back to the dandelions.

There are thought to be nearly 300 different forms, where leaf and flower variations provide the key to specific identification. Part of the reason for this diversity is that individual flowers are capable of both asexual (apomixis) and sexual seed formation. The ones producing asexually generated seed, without pollination, therefore manage to produce clonal seedlings identical to the parent.

Should seed be produced as a result of sexual cross pollination, then variants can arise.

Not only this, but the dandelion flowers can sometimes produce nectar, but no pollen, or vice versa.

In addition, they’re unusual in producing both the female and male organs – anthers and stigma/style, on the same structure.

I can quite see that since dandelions can flower in pretty much every month of the year, this will be a subject I’ll revisit. But for now, and to appreciate some of the points I’ve skimmed over here, do visit this site for some brilliant close up images of the flower’s structure, by Brian Johnston.Finally, as if this wasn’t enough, the milky dandelion sap is a potential source of latex, and apparently some are toying with the idea of making tyres from extracts of the sap.

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The last surprise from the meadow came as a result of doing a torchlight walk of the mown path counting slugs.Amazingly, when I did this earlier this week, I found just 2 slugs, but 6 toadlets/froglets, over the 330 yards.It seems that this year, as well as a complete collapse in slug numbers here, the frogs and toads have been hugely successful. How long this status quo will be maintained, I have no idea, but it’s likely to be a great year for establishing seedlings both in the garden and the meadow without the usual catastrophic slug predation.

Whilst completing the walk, I stopped abruptly after seeing a very odd 3 inch tall vertical structure to one side of the mown path. There were obvious black and white bands up the stem, and then I noticed what seemed to be a couple of flattened wings stuck to the apex.

Minutes, and many photos later it became clear that I was witnessing the emergence of a Daddy longlegs, or Mosquito hawk, or Crane fly, Tipulidae spp. from its pupal stage.The “Leatherjacket” larvae feed on roots beneath the soil, and can cause significant damage to lawns and pasture apparently. but like dandelions, I had no idea how diverse an insect group they are. Evidently there are over 15,000 species worldwide, and perhaps 300 in the UK. Click here and here for more, from the excellent sites of Leicestershire and Rutland Nature Spot, and the Entomological Society of America.   

The adult craneflies are very short lived, and have no feeding mouthparts, so don’t bite like mosquitoes. The females emerge with mature eggs already formed internally, and often mate immediately before laying their eggs in damp grass. Indeed, if you look at the video clip below, taken quite late on its emergence, you’ll see another crane fly appears to check out the emerging adult.

I’ve never seen this emergence before, and it was worth considerable discomfort gingerly lying down on my front, so soon after surgery to get some of these images (well, I think so, anyway). But I wasn’t able to stay for long enough to see the fly take off!

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October 10th 2018:

The other main speaker was Dr. Gareth Griffiths from Aberystwyth University talking about grassland fungi. This opened my eyes to the significance of what is almost completely hidden out of sight beneath our feet, yet plays such a significant role in the whole of life on earth.

Gareth has opted to study waxcaps in his research, in part because the global system for designating the marker fungi species of diverse, old grassland (the CHEG system, after the 4 genera involved – Clavaroids, Hygrocybe, Entoloma, Geoglossom) was developed by an amateur mycologist based in Lampeter, West Wales, Maurice Rotheroe.  Click here for more on his interesting background – journalist, come naturalist. Gareth was indeed inspired by Maurice, and has kept Wales at the global forefront of knowledge of this subject. Astonishingly though, there are currently no undergraduate degree courses available in mycology in the UK. So, an area of symbiotic biology of vital significance to most plant growth and healthy soil ecosystems, and therefore underpinning much of food production on the planet, pales into real insignificance when global research funds and energies are allocated.

Perhaps because it is indeed out of sight beneath our feet.

Better to fund all that analysis of who did what, where and when, and make sure one can destroy an enemy should the need arise. Really?

Perhaps the latest alarm call from the IPCC will change minds, though I somehow doubt it. Click here for their summary.

Gareth began by explaining the essence of the carbon cycle which fuels all life on earth, and the critical role that fungi play in this. Here’s a quick résumé.

Plants capture the energy of the sun through photosynthesis and fix it in the form of carbohydrates. Three of these are complex polymers – cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin – which are specific to plants, and form the components of typical plant cell walls (typically in an approximate ratio of about 4:3:3 – depending on plant type). These complex polymers of simple sugars, often with thousands of repeated, but bonded simple components, are sufficiently challenging structures that animals still haven’t evolved a way of degrading these molecules themselves.

In the case of cellulose and hemicellulose, several grass or plant eating animals have evolved digestive systems entirely reliant on microbes – both bacteria and fungi, in their intestines (either in the rumen, or caecum), which can break down the cellulose in plant cell walls into the component simpler molecules, like glucose, which can then be absorbed from the gut and used for animal growth.

Lignin however was a tougher digestive nut to crack, being the hard, dark brown material, which gives woody plants their rigidity. Gareth explained that during the carboniferous period (of about 60 million years duration, and which ended about 300 million years ago), plants evolved lignin, but there was simply no way of degrading it in the earth’s ecosystems. The result being that when plants died the leaf and woody debris just accumulated and gradually built up, in due course becoming the deposits of oil and coal which have fuelled man’s increasing energy demands over the very recent past. As the leaves drop this autumn and the yard and meadows become littered with tree debris, what a sobering thought as to what would happen if this material wasn’t so efficiently recycled out of sight.

Times changed when fungi eventually evolved the enzymes capable of breaking down lignin. A complex soup of various extracellular enzymes, produced principally by white rot Baciomyecetes fungi are now thought to be the principal drivers which degrade the roughly 20% of organic matter in typical soils which derives from all the lignin in plant cell walls – in dead leaves, twigs, logs, and roots. This gradual but continual fungal degradation releases the carbon accumulated in plant cell growth back into simple forms, which are then available for both animal and other plant growth. The carbon cycle is far too complex to pursue here, but click here for a good review by NASA.

Gareth also mentioned that the fruiting bodies of mushrooms represent only about 1% of the total mass of the fungal organism, which has a huge and often very long-lived network of mycelia strands below the ground surface, often itself connecting with the roots of many plants, and involved in complex two-way exchanges of nutrients with plant roots. It’s now widely accepted that probably 90% of plants have root interactions with such AM or arbuscomycorrhizal fungi.

Wales is a global hotspot for grassland waxcap species. I’d always thought that this was a consequence of the very damp local conditions, but Gareth explained that it was also partly because of the hilly terrain and “poor” soils locally, which has meant that areas of the landscape have simply never been ploughed or received fertiliser treatments. Both of which can very quickly completely destroy the underground networks of many of these colourful waxcap fungi. As part of his work, he’s been to visit the longest running ecological survey of grassland at the internationally renowned Rothamsted research institute in Hertfordshire.Here, in the “Park grass plots”, annual monitoring of many distinct plots created from a single meadow back in the 1860’s has conclusively shown that plant species diversity has diminished over the years, and many grassland fungi disappeared very quickly in response to applications of nitrogen, lime or phosphorous. However, amazingly, Gareth still regularly finds, in autumn, fruiting bodies of some waxcap mushrooms on the two control plots which have never received any artificial applications over all these decades. These are nearly unique waxcap records, from the counties surrounding London. They have simply been wiped out by “agricultural improvements” from all other agricultural land.

So what?

Well, it seems that in terms of total soil organic carbon storage, nothing apparently beats diverse old permanent grassland, managed as it typically is with livestock grazing and maybe a hay crop. Even converting such land into forestry, which is currently happening apace in many areas of Wales, will reduce the ability of a given acreage of soil to sequester carbon. In major part, this ability to store carbon, hidden, and out of sight beneath our feet, is exactly what the grassland fungi are doing in their complex interactions with plants’ roots.Meanwhile, scientists are striving to develop technological solutions to try to capture the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in our warming atmosphere, and store it underground. Without apparently much success, so far.

Strange world, eh?

Finally, and most intriguingly, Gareth mentioned some of his research looking at the concentrations of the heavy isotopes of carbon, C, and nitrogen, N, in different animal and fungal tissues. The higher up the food chain an animal is, the greater the proportion of these heavier isotopes found in tissue samples. For example in a marine environment the plankton will have low levels, plankton feeding shellfish will concentrate these isotopes and have higher levels, fish which eat shellfish higher levels still, and a predator like a Polar bear will have the highest levels of both heavy N and C, in their body tissues.

Gareth found that most saprophytic fungi, which help to decompose plant material do indeed have higher levels of the heavy carbon isotope, but much to his surprise, the waxcap mushrooms have dramatically higher heavy nitrogen levels. Gareth thinks this implies that these fungi have a role in decomposing decaying animal matter, hence are saprobic, but as yet he has no conclusive evidence of how they are doing this or what they are feeding on. Click here for more.Part of the problem with researching these fungi, is that it’s proved almost impossible to cultivate the fungi in the laboratory, in spite of years of trying. A marked contrast to many of the other fungi which form part of an approximately £42 billion industry serving human consumption. By coincidence Kew Gardens have also very recently released a review document on the state of the world’s fungi. Click here for an interesting read.

There is a great review article, co-authored by Gareth and outlining aspects of grassland fungi management which was published in British Wildlife magazine which you can read by clicking here.

My own excitement with finding grassland fungi in most of our meadows as we’ve changed the land management over the last few years, is now matched by thoughts about what gardeners can learn from some of these concepts, about the huge role that often hidden fungi will play beneath the soil surface in our gardens, and how we can best nurture and respect these.

Are applications of high nitrogen material, or high phosphorous material always a good idea, since they will severely impact on many fungi?

Is soil disturbance through digging rational?

Do bulbs add an additional level of carbon sequestration to a garden environment?

As our garden moves in many areas into a more mature, settled type of semi-woodland ecosystem, topped up with natural leaf litter, and the occasional sprinkling of wood ash or dry seaweed, I’m convinced that beneath the soil surface, increasingly complex webs of activity between fungi, and bulb, plant and tree roots are indeed creating an incredibly complex internet of all living things – whether I fully understand it, or not. Should you google this term, you’ll find a cool half a billion search options, including an article, click here, which uses the phrase in a different, though intriguing sense, and explains that we’re on the cusp of availability of portable devices enabling anyone to genome sequence any organism anywhere, and upload the data to the cloud.

Not quite what I envision with the term, but might it mean that amateur DIY sequencing of, say, fungal mycorrhizae linking in to bulb roots, will soon be an option for the keen gardener scientist?

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October 16th 2018:

I wrote last time about an inspirational talk on grassland fungi, and how it has opened my eyes to the critical role of fungi in natural ecosystems. A few days ago, we had a second slant on fungi from a talk by Bruce Langridge of the National Botanic Garden of Wales, who’s been instrumental in raising awareness of fungi at the NBGW over many years now.

Featuring a range of different fungi fruiting bodies covering a gamut of sizes and forms, Bruce made the comment that when he took on his role of Head of Engagement at the NBGW he knew nothing about fungi, having had a botanical background. However, the fact that the NBGW has nationally significant waxcap mushroom permanent pastures, meant that he became increasingly fascinated by the mushrooms he began to find there, and having got his eye in, he now keeps finding new examples whenever he’s out and about.

I’d picked a selection of the most recent fungi from our own meadows, above, to take in for people to look at during this meeting at Cothigardeners, and it was a special delight that Fiona had found, for the first time a small cluster of Golden spindles, Clavulinopsis fusiformis, just the day before.

With renewed enthusiasm after the talk, and in the peak season for grassland fungi, I clearly had my eyes tuned in as I walked up our path through the upper hay meadow the following day, where something small and orange caught my attention.

I’d never seen this type of fungal fruiting body before, and thinking it might have been a form of Earthtongue fungus emailed some photos to Pat O’Reilly who lives nearby and has written extensively on fungi, to see what he suggested as an ID. Click here for more on Pat’s knowledge of fungi. Shortly afterwards I also put the photos and description onto iSpot.

Within 24 hours two possible ID’s were suggested, one a rare form of Microglossom Earth tongue fungus, the other the wonderfully named Scarlet Caterpillarclub fungus,  Cordyceps militaris. So called, because this is a fungus which specifically attacks the underground larvae or pupae of grassland moths, a so called entomopathogen. Once a fungal spore has germinated on the moth larval body, it has the ability to pierce the defensive chitinous external layer, invade the circulatory fluid system and then begin to grow a mycelium structure throughout all of the caterpillar’s body tissues. It then devours the caterpillar’s body, kills it, and eventually if environmental conditions are appropriate, will produce a fruiting body similar to the one shown here.

Armed with this name, and life cycle, I carefully dug round the fruiting body, and teased away the soil for confirmation – the photos below show the dark caterpillar sprouting the fruiting bodies, with what look like 2 or 3 more fruiting bodies at an early stage of development.

These fungi are not found very often – in part no doubt because they are quite tricky to spot, but also because they could easily and quickly be destroyed through slug damage. Most of our grassland mushrooms seem to be magnets for any slugs still left in the meadows, and hence don’t normally survive intact for many days. The fact that the fruiting bodies were in the shorter grass of the mown path, and also that slug numbers have collapsed so dramatically this year in our meadows, probably explains why I did manage to find it.

Globally there are currently over 400 species of Cordyceps, and this particular one, and a Chinese cousin C. sinensis, have been recognised for some time as containing chemicals, particularly cordycepin, with a huge range of potential medicinal uses from cancer suppression through immuno-stimulation and even as a pre-Viagra treatment for erectile dysfunction. Click here and here.So much so, that for a number of years it’s been commercially grown on artificial media to enable harvesting of exactly the tiny fruiting bodies shown above. It’s fascinating that with so much Asian awareness of its therapeutic potential value, I’d never even heard of it before, let alone come across it.

Some intriguing thoughts occurred to me as I researched this.

Firstly, whether there are any such fungi which attack slugs in the same way? I couldn’t find any records at all however, and given this lack of slug predation, might slug slime have some protective anti-fungal properties? Click here for an insight into current research on this, and how slug slime’s antimicrobial properties might even be a valuable counter to human problems with MRSA in the future.

Secondly, given the apparently high heavy nitrogen isotope content of waxcap mushrooms, which I mentioned in my previous post, as discovered by Gareth Griffith’s research, might these fungi be secret slug killers, or consumers? Might the reduction in slug numbers I’ve described in part be because of the increasing numbers of waxcaps which we now find in our meadows? Pure speculation on my part.

Who knows?

Fortunately, the fungi survived trampling by our ram lambs which have been in this meadow for the last 2 weeks, and I’m assuming that perhaps neither the colour, form or smell of these tiny structures has figured on their radar, unlike other objects encountered as they inquisitively explore their current pasture.

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Posted in May Garden Views 2019:

The garden itself progressed beautifully through the month, and the dry weather meant that once again, as in 2018, we began cutting some top, and wet meadow, “hay” around May 18th – a very light leafy crop, but which allows quick aftermath regrowth and a Chelsea chop effect for many of the meadow flowers, extending the season of pollen and nectar interest for insects.

 

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June 25th 2019:

We’re at that time of the year when our focus is easily distracted away from the garden and into the meadow. In part because we have to try to work out when we’re likely to get weather appropriate for hay making. In part because the almost daily changing scene is fabulous, with colours and impressionistic intermingled patterns, created by the plant palette, changing light, and weather conditions.

Until a few days ago, although we’ve had brief bursts of sunshine, we’ve had no run of 3 dry days in a row, which is what we really need to make hay.

Then the weather gods relented and off we rushed, though this year it’s been a wrench to cut plants still in their flowering prime. We’ve now got vastly more meadow buttercups and white clover in flower, all being worked by bumblebees, but we simply have to cut some at this stage. We can’t manage to process huge areas of hay at one time with our labour intensive, semi-manual approach, and cutting now should still mean some flowers emerging at the tail end of summer before we need to graze this field.

In contrast our commercial friends clear whole hillsides in a couple of days, though the harvest is shockingly flower free in these days of haylage, silage and NPK fertilisers.5 different vehicles in use on the hill above, starting at dawn on a Sunday morning to shift the above crop and clear the field in just a few hours.

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July 22nd 2019:

The meadow here has continued to delight us, and in spite of the fatigue that hits as we close in on the end of haymaking, the speed of progression of floral diversity in our meadows is thrilling.

A feature of haymaking this year has been an incredibly tame robin which has appeared in both our hay meadows, once we get the forks and rakes working. Its keen vision enabling it to spot small caterpillars amongst the drying hay.

The last photo shows a turned down bag I used to collect seed shaken from hay cut the previous day to transfer to other fields to increase plant diversity.

I was chatting with a fellow local meadow owner recently about how tricky it is to capture the appearance of a meadow with still images, but I think this year I’ve got a little closer, since the light has often been gorgeous at different times of the day. Although many of the images need enlarging, to really pick up the details.

In addition, thanks to the NGS and also the Coronation Meadows website, our mini break incorporated a couple of visits to wildflower hay meadows that were truly glorious and on a large enough scale to provide real vistas.

First, was the beautiful house gardens and location at Hurdley Hall Gardens, Churchstoke, Montgomery, which we took in on our journey North with a minor detour. Click here for more details. The main meadows were created only 3 years ago by importing green hay from a Coronation Meadow site just a few miles North, and simply scattering it onto the existing pasture, allowing most of the seeds to fall to the ground in their new location. The pictures show just how successful, and fast this technique can be at transforming ordinary pasture into a sea of flowers.

Secondly, I’d found that the named coronation meadow for Northumberland (Barrowburn Farm) was only about 45 minutes from our B&B base at Thistleyhaugh Farm, a very special place with wonderful hospitality from Enid and Janice on the family farm. This has been in the same ownership for over 120 years and is the only organic and pasture for life farm in the whole of the county.

Barrowburn Farm meadows near Alwinton, lie in the stunning Coquet valley in the North West of the county, just a couple of miles from the Scottish border.Click here for more. The land is owned by the MOD, and to the South are the Otterburn ranges, so the frequent red flags and warning signs meant we kept to the footpaths.

The coronation meadow site notes that these meadows are some of the finest, not just in the UK, but the whole of Europe, and so persuaded us to pursue the single track, dead end road required to reach them. Very much off the main tourist track, it felt much like parts of the countryside around us. Beautiful, and ignored by the masses, since there’s very little there, and it’s a long trek to find anywhere that even serves a cup of tea.

There aren’t any identifying information boards at the meadows, or even signage with footpath routes, so it would have been an advantage to have had an OS map with us. But there is some simple information by the nearest car park, at Wedder’s Leap.So called, because local legend recalls a fellow stealing a sheep (wether, or wedder) and trying to cross the nearby swollen stream whilst still clutching the animal. He fell and was dragged away with the sodden woolly beast to his death.

How appropriate that on the way back from the walk we found a stand of Melancholy thistles, Cirsium heterophyllum, growing beside the stream at the site of his demise.So called, because in times past, the prickle free plants were used to treat melancholia, or depression. In Nicholas Culpeper’s herbal of 1653 he wrote “the decoction of the thistle in wine being drank, expels superfluous melancholy out of the body, and makes a man as merry as a cricket; … my opinion is, that it is the best remedy against all melancholy diseases”.

We didn’t make it up into the hills above the farm, but for an idea of how spectacular the scenery is in winter, click here for a brilliant WordPress blog on the 9 mile circuit by “Mart In The Hills”, which you can complete from the same car park. He also records the site of a murder scene in the hills above the farm.

Like all meadows you have to get up amongst the flowers to really appreciate just how beautiful they are, and how like all meadows the plant mix is pretty unique to the site, a significant feature being the beautiful small blue Geranium sylvaticum.

On our way back from the hay meadows site, we’d planned a longer circular walk up into the hills above Alwinton. Click here for the route.

Two and a half hours of glorious walking with no other people seen. We saw hares, herons and even an oystercatcher. Most stunningly, the hillsides and valley bottoms  were covered in wildflowers, even where grazed by sheep.The smell of nectar from the white clover and wild thyme filled the air. Pignut,  Conopodium majus, and Chimney Sweeper moths, Odezia atrata were in abundance.

Hugely inspirational for continuing the process of getting more flowers into all our fields, and avoiding the overstocking so prevalent in Wales, which means we never see scenes like this locally.

Even the streams were flower filled.

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 August 10th 2019:

With such a lovely summer, and many opportunities for small scale hay making, there’s been masses of collectible seed produced by different meadow grasses and flowers.

This year we’ve used green hay from our upper, more florally diverse meadow to begin to spread more flowers into our other fields. It’s surprising how even our very young visitors enjoyed helping Grumpy with sticks or boots, flicking the seed laden green hay around.In addition, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort hand collecting particular favoured species’ seeds and scattering them around – selfheal, Prunella vulgaris, eyebright, Euphrasia spp., cat’s ears, Hypochaeris radicata, bird’s-foot trefoil, Lotus corniculatus and orchids.

In addition, I’ve collected seed from Snake’s head fritillaries, Fritillaria meleagris, capsules in the meadow and Camassias currently growing in the garden. On the advice of a friend who’s had great success naturalising these, the seeds of these bulbs were laboriously “sown” rather than simply scattered, by working across the upper hillside, sloping meadow with a lawn edging half-moon, and about every metre or so, making a shallow groove/slot in the turf and sprinkling a few seeds in. Really a two person job for a dry day, and as we removed swathes of hay, William and I worked our way up the hill in this way.

With about 7,000 gathered fritillary seeds, and about a half dozen per slot, you can imagine that this is tedious work. However the plan is that if a fair proportion of these mature into flowering bulbs in 3 or 4 years’ time, I’ll simply then allow any seed to fall naturally.

Or better still cutting and turning for hay should then more easily and quickly spread these lovely flowers around. As well as creating the chance to harvest green hay, complete with this sort of diverse seed mix.

I recently bought a copy of Bob Gibbons’ lovely book “Wildflower Wonders of The World”, which features 50 wildflower rich sites from around the globe. Well worth acquiring for an inspirational read.

The flora of the Burren from Ireland; a scene of the machair from the Outer Hebrides; and the coastal flora of the Lizard in Cornwall are the only images of wildflowers from close to home, which seems a real shame. Bob gives advice for visiting all of the sites included in the book.

But isn’t there a need to enthuse UK residents with the awe inspiring images of such natural plant communities without hopping on a plane to a distant land to experience being amongst such beauty?

This week has seen yet more pressure heaped upon traditional British pasture land management grazed by herbivores which are subsequently harvested for meat, by the mainstream media’s reporting of the latest IPCC climate change report – “Climate Change and Land”, click here.

I’m hoping for even more below the surface sequestered carbon, in the form of all those extra bulbs which should develop in just a few years. As well as providing a vibrant long season of interest above ground with huge appeal for invertebrates, birds, and herbivores, and a visual feast for any who explore the meadows.

However, the rabbits may put paid to my best efforts. Time will tell.

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In a final reference to quality time spent with delightful young visitors, it was wonderful to be able to demonstrate to keen youngsters from the next generation just why yellow rattle is so called, and then after climbing longevity hill, observe them whizzing down the hill from the Hut.Suddenly they peeled off ahead of me, into the regrown aftermath from the very first cut of hay, and spotting a single big yellow rattle flower, took a while to work out how to pull off the seed heads on a plant still a little firmly anchored in the soil, and to its adjacent, parasitised grass roots.

We also had fun catching grass hoppers, something I haven’t done for a long time, but in my own teenage years I recall doing so on a few family caravan based holidays, where we used them as bait for wild Austrian trout, in rushing alpine streams.

There’s a good guide to identifying different grasshopper species, click here, and this year a quick recce seems to have identified at least 3 species in our meadows. (Field, Chorthippus brunneus, Meadow, Chorthippus parallelus, and Common Green, Omocestus viridulus, in the images below). As well as having certain distinct physical features outlined in the above link, they also all create different stridulation sound patterns – made by rubbing legs and wings parts together.

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September 29th 2019:

In a previous post I hinted at a very good year for waxcap mushrooms in our meadows, and given the number I was seeing from walking our meandering upper hay meadow mown path, I thought a more detailed count would be worthwhile.It seems that our meadows are developing into quite significant bastions for these globally extremely rare and really colourful mushrooms, which I’m guessing many readers will never have seen “in the flesh” so please bear with my nerdy enthusiasm.

I began in our upper hay meadow with contour following passes across the field at roughly 2 metre spacings. This sort of “eyes down” walk is necessary to avoid missing any fruiting bodies, which otherwise can easily remain hidden amongst grass that hasn’t been grazed yet since the annual hay cut.

The numbers recorded have amazed me.The first effort on August 30th yielded 492 fruiting bodies in what I recorded as 72 distinct patches or colonies.The majority (over 380) were the vibrantly orange coloured Fibrous waxcap, Hygrocybe intermedia, above. Though 3 other species were present in smaller numbers, with a few unidentified specimens.

The equally bold and appropriately named Golden waxcap, H. chlorophana, above, was the next most numerous with 65 mushrooms.

Then 12 much smaller Glutinous waxcaps, H. glutinipes, above,and finally.

12 Citrine waxcaps, H. citrinovirens. 

Many of the smaller, younger fruiting bodies were only just showing through the ground hugging, mossy basal layer, which is present in most of this meadow. It seems that this is critical in creating a much warmer, and moister micro-climate for them to develop successfully. So don’t rake or scarify your meadows, if you want waxcaps to thrive.

We rarely find any in more recently mown areas. Apart from sheep grazing from October to early February, the upper hay meadow is un-grazed, and cut once, in stages, from mid-May onwards. It occasionally has wood ash spread on areas of it, and on two occasions had a light top dressing of dried seaweed meal.

Last year this meadow produced a heavy crop of field mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, from a different area of the meadow. This year, so far, I’ve only found 2 field mushrooms.

Most of these mushrooms are very short lived, so just 4 days later, many of the Fibrous waxcaps had disappeared or were shrivelling to a brown black, with perhaps just 29 new ones having popped up, although this was very subjective, being judged by the undamaged appearance of any “new” ones.

But I reckoned there were now an additional 124 Golden waxcaps and a further 16 H. citrinovirens.

Many of these mushrooms are quickly damaged by slugs, but since the “Beast from The East” in March 2018, and then the very dry summer last year, our meadow slug population is a tiny percentage of what it has been in the past.

We always start to see a few Fibrous waxcaps as we mow the field in sections from late June onwards, but it’s clearly impossible to assess just how many might be present earlier in the year, beneath the uncut sward.

I thought I’d weigh a few typical mushrooms, which seemed to average about 10 g apiece.

So maybe a standing crop of about 5 KG of waxcaps in this fairly small, less than one acre area, on just one day. Using Gareth Griffiths’ (the waxcap expert from Aberystwyth University) estimate that the biomass of typical fungal fruiting bodies is only about 1% of the total fungal biomass, that would imply about 500 KG of fungi in this meadow! Not bad for carbon sequestration either. And that’s just from these early species – no sign on this date of any Pink waxcaps.

With drier weather, a follow up count on September 11th yielded far fewer new mushrooms: Fibrous 30 in 15 patches, Golden – 18 in 5, Citrine – 9 in 3; Glutinous – 1 in 1; and the first Pink waxcaps, H. calyptriformis – 3 in 1.

After a wonderful sunny hot week in Devon, the rain arrived with a vengeance, and as well as a singleton of an additional species in this meadow, probably a Spangle waxcap, Hygrocybe insipida.

2 further species were found in our lower wet hay meadow. Firstly (probably?) Orange waxcap, Hygrocybe aurantiosplendens.

and also (probably) Pale waxcap, Cuphophyllus pratensis.

Yesterday in the rain, on September 28th, a hurried count in our steep small field which is only ever grazed by our sheep, and not cut for hay, gave a total of an astonishing 786 Pink waxcaps.

All this before we head into the peak waxcap month of October. I did find an interesting piece of work by Griffiths et al on how sward management can impact on waxcap populations. Click here for more. This seems to demonstrate that regular short mowing produced the highest numbers of fruiting bodies. It’s clear from the images in this steep sloping meadow that the Pink waxcaps seem to be performing very well in spite of the long grass in this field this year.

Two other interesting observations are that the different meadows, and/or their management seem to favour different waxcap species.

Fibrous waxcap predominates in the upper hay meadow, Pink waxcap in the steep sloping meadow; and currently Glutinous waxcap is the predominant species in the lower wet meadow.Our 3 other fields all have waxcaps in them, but currently not enough for me to justify the time needed for a detailed count.

Secondly, in both the steep meadow and the upper hay meadow, which have a very similar aspect and slope, the Pink waxcaps are predominantly in the lower third of the field, and generally away from the hedgerows.In the lower meadow, my passes from the upper, to lower parts of this meadow showed the following distribution of Pink waxcaps.

20 in 7 patches (Upper pass)

10 in 72

50 in 12

73 in 12

366 in 73

186 in 29

29 in 5 (Lowest pass)

 

My theory for this skewed distribution is that because our sheep nearly always spend the night resting or asleep at the top of these steep fields, there will be significantly more dung and urine deposited in these areas. Knowing how sensitive waxcap fungal networks are to high phopshorus and nitrogen, this may well inhibit fungal development in these parts of the fields.

A final thought.

How much do we really understand about grassland ecology? There are clearly huge biomasses of these fungi in our few “impoverished” upland meadows, with much locked in carbon, and probable interactions with the many other plant, microbe and invertebrate organisms seen, or unseen. And who knows about any impact on our very poorly understood moles? Such fungi were once common place in all our permanent pastures and hay meadows right across the countryside, before modern agricultural “improvements” and near ubiquitous fertiliser and slurry applications eliminated them.

Apart from the fleeting aesthetic beauty of these colourful autumnal crops, do we have any idea of just how “impoverished” and inadequate much of our grassland ecology is without them?

__________

 

_________

October 29th 2019:

A fortnight ago, we headed down to the National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW) for their annual Wales Fungus day event. In spite of a poor forecast, as always there were several interesting talks and events laid on, including their displays of locally found fungi.

Since our meadows have continued to produce a diverse range of waxcaps over the last 2 months, I thought I’d pick a sample for the NBGW fungi table display as I’d done a couple of weeks earlier for the autumnal Carmarthenshire Meadows Group meeting.

It is quite amazing to me how these nationally rare, at least in the whole of the UK, colourful mushrooms, have been thriving and multiplying ever since our land management has changed in recent years, and these photos give another idea of what one can find in a quick walk around our fields at this time of the year.

We opted to take the slower, back route up the mountain to the NBGW, since we’ve just acquired a couple of e-bikes, and wanted to check out the hilly back road terrain (more on these once I’ve worked out how to take good photos from our forays). As a result, we passed an amazing colony of Fly agarics, Amanita muscaria, just beside the road and carefully picked an enormous pristine example to add to our own mushrooms.

Notice the edible Cep bolete mushroom, Boletus edulis, below right – Bruce Langridge later explained that these are often found growing in the same site as the poisonous Fly agarics.

This glorious red and white mushroom turned out to be one of the stars of the display at the NBGW, below, and none of the fungi experts present seemed to recall ever seeing one as big. Bruce Langridge, the NBGW’s director of interpretation and guiding light behind the interest in fungi at the NBGW is indeed the man responsible for establishing a National Fungus day, now held annually across the UK. He was delighted to see our waxcaps, since the Garden’s own meadow waxcaps had largely finished fruiting.

In an interesting chat with Bruce and a research student who’s about to begin a project to see if he can grow waxcaps “artificially”, I mentioned that I wondered whether slugs might play some role in the germination of their spores. To date no one has been able to culture waxcaps. It’s known that they thrive in mossy turf, but simply taking the spore laden mushrooms and putting them into a new area doesn’t seem to work. We speculated why this might be. My own thought is that perhaps the mushroom spores need to pass through a vector like a slug and that the spores are activated in some way by passage through the slug’s gut.Back home, a bit of research discovered that it’s been established that both ferns, lichens and liverwort spores can all pass through a mollusc’s intestine and be viable and germinate afterwards, thus allowing the potential for spreading a species over a wider territory. Click here and here for more. Such gut transmission and priming of seed for germination is well known with many plant seeds, and if ever proven with slugs and fungi could be considered to be another example of endozoochory, a new word for me, meaning seed dispersal by being carried within an animal in some way. It would be interesting to know if this is why waxcaps have done so well in our fields. Although the huge slug population which for many years existed here, is still currently in drastically diminished numbers.

A fortnight after this Wales Fungus day, and nearly 2 months after the first wave of orange red Fibrous waxcaps, Hygrocybe intermedia, appeared around the turn of August, we still had some vibrant examples (above, probably Spangle waxcap, Hygrocybe insipida, ) which had recently appeared for the garden visitors who bravely chanced a trip out a day after the wettest 24 hour period we’ve had since last year’s named storm Callum hit us.69 mm of rain had fallen in 24 hours, leaves littered the yard and paths, but fortunately our hilly site means the rain rushes away quite quickly, and the sun shone benignly for Sunday, although a chilly Easterly wind had picked up.

Even more unusual for our visitors, was the crop of mushrooms which have appeared on our mossy croquet lawn this year. At least 7 species, but the highlight for 2019 has been the number of Earthtongue fungi, above. There are several different species of these in the UK, (Geoglossum and Trichoglossum being the most common genera) which are quite tricky to tell apart, but all are considered rare. Click here for the best guide to identification I could find. They contribute to how highly rated a site is for fungi diversity, so increasingly our “impoverished” land seems to be moving into being a grassland fungi hotspot. Earthtongues are some of the last grassland fungi to actually push their fruiting bodies above ground, and in contrast to many waxcaps, the black tongues also survive for several weeks, in spite of the occasional frost which has already affected us.

Like many other grassland fungi, these would quickly be driven out of the mossy turf by any conventional lawn treatments aiming to create a more uniform weed and moss free green lawn, which we’ve never used here. Click here for more on grassland fungi ecology in a good review (by Griffith, Jones and Easton). In future I’ll set the lawnmower blade a little higher as we head into late summer to try to encourage these even more.

This year there are hundreds of these Earthtongues appearing on our croquet lawn, adding an eerie touch to the garden as we approach Halloween.

 

________

November 24th 2019:

I assumed that the mushroom season was now over for the year following a severe frost, a few days before the snow, on November 9th, which brought most of the fabulous autumnal leaf colour this year to an abrupt end.

This made me think it was time to graze off the remaining aftermath in the hay meadows, so our ewes were moved to the upper hay meadow a week ago. The following day, the snow had arrived. This delayed final grazing, is much later than in any previous year, but has allowed many flowering plant seedlings to establish well.

A meandering walk down through the field showed yet more Meadow waxcaps, Hygrocybe pratensis, had emerged, some of which were clearly part of an expanding ring formation.Further down the field I came across an extensive colony of a small red waxcap species, probably Hygrocybe coccinea, covering an area with very shallow soil on a South facing slope.There must be well over a hundred of these small waxcaps, in this area of roughly 15 X 3 metres, which hasn’t produced any other mushrooms through the season.

There seems little information on relative fruiting times of different species, but we’ve now had one or more species fruiting in this field for nearly 5 months from early July. I’m sure it’s been an exceptional year, but it would be interesting to be able to record accurately in future years exactly where the different colonies are growing. These have added another huge dimension of interest to our wildflower meadows, which we had no awareness of, when we began the restoration process about 6 years ago.

I’m spending quite a lot of time currently working on a new slide illustrated talk, which gets its first outing at the Farmyard Nurseries Winter Gardening weekend next February in Llandysul, when I’m going to try to draw on some of the features of wildflower hay meadow ecosystems and how they can inform and influence how gardeners can plan more sustainable and biodiverse plant based communities.

Fungi will certainly get a mention, and I was interested to find a recent research review by a global team of fungi experts, including the locally based waxcap expert Gareth Griffiths, from Aberystwyth University. Click here for the paper, titled “Isotopic evidence of biotrophy and unusual nitrogen nutrition in soil‐dwelling Hygrophoraceae”. (Waxcaps – sic)

The research centres around analysis of waxcap tissues from several different continents, and also from the different woodland ecosystems which is mainly where they are found in other parts of the world. (Subtropical laurel forest in the Canary Islands, broad leaf forest habitats in New Zealand, primary lowland moist evergreen forest in Amazonian Ecuador, primary lowland rainforest in Gabon, coniferous forest/swamp in Massachusetts, U. S. A.).All the waxcaps show high levels of the more unusual (heavy) 15 Nitrogen isotope, in marked contrast to the much lower 15 Nitrogen found in plant tissues and other mushroom producing fungi. The scientists suspect that this may mean that waxcaps are processing animal protein, which normally has higher 15 Nitrogen in its make-up, and probably invertebrates, (especially worms and Diptera (fly) larvae), since these make up over 70% of the typical animal biomass in undisturbed grassland soils.

What still fascinates me about these fungi which are globally very rare in grassland habitats, now, (apart from selected sites in Wales!) is that they’re still so poorly understood, and almost completely unknown in our gardens. Mainly because of cultivation and fertiliser applications, both of which will destroy the mycelial networks. Yet here they are, thriving and constituting literally tons per acre of unseen, underground biomass, with all of the stored carbon in their fungal mycelia, in a moss ridden, nutrient poor, upland hillside field.

Another observation after just a week of aftermath grazing by the ewes, who have also managed to raid the hay barn early for supplementation, is how they have selectively attacked the basal rosettes of the Lanceolate (Ribwort) plantain, Plantago lanceolata.One of the advantages of a spot of dung collection for the veg garden, above, being one criss-crosses the field and tends to notice such minor changes.

With plenty of grass still available in this field, and young leaves of sorrel and dandelions as well, it’s clearly just the plantain which has been attacked with such gusto.Remember as well, that sheep can manage to achieve this with just a lower set of incisors working against their upper fleshy gum pad. They really must want to eat every last bit.

There’s currently little of this plantain growing in our other fields, so is it the taste that’s appealing to them? Or its increased palatability, or mineral content – it’s known that plantain has much higher calcium, magnesium, copper and sodium levels than most grasses?

Or is it the levels of the sugary sorbitol and mannitol in the leaves which makes them tastier?

Or are they self-medicating to access the anti-inflammatory effects of the plant? Which I’ve written about before in a post, click here, where I highlighted Austrian research into this plantain’s pharmacological activities.

Or its antimicrobial properties?

Or even the gel like mucilage in the leaves and seeds? Nearly all the remaining seed heads have also already been nipped off their stems, above. If you want to find out what the new word for this post of myxospermy means, click here for some detailed research on the specific slime like adhesive properties of P. lanceolata seeds.

Looking across the field, certain plantain plants seem to have been preferentially attacked, and this may relate to the considerable variability within this plant species. All of the plantain in this field is the result of introduced seeds from a number of different sites, so it’s not surprising perhaps that there’s some variability. Is this behaviour though perhaps an example of our sheep now perceiving this increasingly diverse sward as a cae ysbyty (Welsh), or hospital field? One in which they’re capable of self-selecting herbage for its specific medicinal effects? Click here for a little more on this ancient Welsh concept.

In New Zealand, 2 specific named cultivars of P. lanceolata, ‘Grasslands Lancelot’, and ‘Ceres Tonic’ have even been used as additions to permanent pasture seed mixes for reseeding. Click here for more. I’ve not been able to find any such named cultivars currently available in the UK. Perhaps I should mark our savaged plantain’s rosettes in some way and collect seed specifically from these next year to spread into our other meadows?

So even at the gloomiest time of the year, when we’re regularly bombarded with how intensively grain-fed pork and chicken, and not pasture-fed livestock; or indeed veganism, is one of the key solutions to both climate change and world food production, our little upland meadow is surprising me with evidence of its complex webs of life, which in this world of exploding knowledge, is hardly understood at all.

Click here for an interesting “On Your Farm” BBC Radio Four discussion from this week, titled “Carbon Counting”, involving a rational Cumbrian mixed livestock farmer Will Case, who seems very informed on many of the issues and the science, and a non-welly owning professor, Mike Berner’s-Lee, the author of “There’s No Planet B“, who’s keen on rewilding and reduced ruminant numbers in our landscape. My impression is that he hasn’t actually visited many British farms before.

And listen too for the any mention of the hugely significant potential for fungal carbon sequestration in permanent pasture. Did I miss it?

_______

March 29th 2021: 

It’s the time of the year when one really notices moles. Or rather, indirectly, the evidence of their presence.

Particularly obvious if you have meadows, or pasture, and always more noticeable in early spring. I knew that this was mating time for moles, but what else did I know about these hidden mammals? What do I and others make of their (literal) handiwork? Does it drive us mad? Do we curse?

Do we yearn for the tiny amber glass strychnine pot, as I remember my G.P. father doing, carefully with gloved hands dipping worms into the crystals, before dropping them into the vertical shaft holes having cleared the molehill soil away, before covering them over again. Fortunately, strychnine use was banned in 2006, but that still leaves a huge range of methods employed to exterminate these hidden animals – traps of many designs, toxic gas pellets, other poisoned baits. But aside from the unsightly appearance of piles of soil, what are the downsides to moles?

Reasons mentioned mainly seem to focus on the aesthetic damage to lawns; or to cutting machinery blades for hay or silage making from the stony molehill soil; or from the risk of contamination of silage with soil present bacteria, like Listeria which can cause disease in animals eating the silage; as well as the potential loss of grazing, in pastures covered with many molehills.

But against these negatives, apart from the usually sensible in the longer term, live-and-let live approach to nature and ecosystems, are there any positives to having a local mole population in a garden, or pasture?

It’s actually quite difficult to find meaningful information on this. We seem so determined to exterminate them, and there are real gaps in our understanding of their ecology and lifecycles. With this in mind I bought one of the few books on the life of the mole – “Moles” by Rob Atkinson, in the British Natural History Collection of books.Well worth a read, and here are a few snippets to share about these fascinating creatures, which you may or may not know:

• Moles live almost entirely solitary lives, in their own independent system of tunnels, which is typically around 1.1 km in length, and will have required about 2,000 kg of soil to have been removed to create this, the mole’s territory.
• The area that this territory covers will depend on how many invertebrates there are in the soil it’s working through.
• Moles sleep in specially constructed nests, lined with dry material and located away from the edges of the territory.
• Mole tunnels lie anything from 5 to 150 cms below ground surface level.
• The tunnels are dug by alternating between the two huge hands, whilst the mole braces with its rear legs against the tunnel wall, using a shearing action on the soil at the tunnel face. The loosened soil is pushed behind the mole, using the rear feet and legs, and every so often the mole swivels around in the narrow tunnel, and pushes the loose soil spoil back down the tunnel in front of it, to an access shaft which it’s dug previously to the surface at an angle of about 45 degrees. The mole then pushes the soil up the shaft with one hand, and onto the surface as a mole hill. As much as 6kg of soil can be shifted in this way within 20 minutes. This is the equivalent of a man of average size, pushing an elephant out of an uphill tunnel, onehanded, within 20 minutes. This is hard physical effort for the mole, and bouts of digging usually last for less than 10 minutes.
• All this effort is fuelled by its diet based on earthworms and other invertebrates, and insect larvae which it encounters whilst digging, or more typically, fall into one of the mole’s tunnels.
• Sometimes moles will create larders where they store partially bitten earthworms, which may even be paralysed by some sort of venom, and these stores will help sustain a mole in times of food shortages, as can occur in periods of extreme drought.
• Most of the year, all moles live entirely independently and only rarely come within even one metre of another mole in their separate tunnel networks, but at mating time, from February to March, male moles will actively seek out females.
• Meanwhile the female mole’s body has been changing. They are unique amongst mammals in having an ovotestes, and not simple ovaries. For most of the year, the ovary is small and the testis large, producing testosterone which means that the female mole is perfectly capable of fighting a male which strays into her territory. Before coming on heat, the testis shrinks in size, the ovary enlarges, and the uterus begins to enlarge from its previously shrivelled state. Even more remarkably, as she nears mating time, she develops a new opening in her skin, which communicates with her vagina. For most of the year, no such access to the vagina and uterus exists. After mating, this opening in the skin heals up and leaves a small scar.
• Pregnancy lasts about 4 weeks and the mole pups are born with reddish skin and no hair.
• The typically 4 pups, grow phenomenally fast, fed by the lactating mother, and stay in the nest for the first several weeks. Their tiny eyes open around day 22 after birth, by which time they’re covered in silvery fur.
• The mother must leave them at regular intervals, hunting for food in her tunnels, before returning to let them suckle.
• After a month or so, the young moles will begin to venture into the tunnel system and over the next few weeks start to eat solid food.
• By week seven, the pups stop feeding on milk, but stay within the mother’s tunnel system, finding their own food, and beginning to venture onto the surface occasionally at night, eventually sleeping in separate nests, before finally being evicted and leaving the maternal territory of tunnels in early June.
• Each pup is now on its own, and travelling above ground at night, it must find either a new unexplored territory and begin to dig, or with less effort, an abandoned tunnel network, in which to set up its own territory and try to carve out its own independent living space. This transition is a risky time for young moles, and many will be predated, by for example, foxes, stoats, and owls.

 

Thinking a little more about the increase in their numbers here, does this reflect growing numbers of earthworms and soil invertebrates, as we gradually move our meadows back to more diverse plant communities?

Or is it linked to us not using any pesticide/vermicide treatments on our sheep for a few years, which has led to a greater number of worms and invertebrates?

Or because none of the fields have received any slurry, muck or NPK in recent years?

We’ve noticed in the light of these questions, how few molehills are ever obvious in slurry treated or intensively managed grassland, but is this because the farmers are killing all their moles anyway?

Finally, we’ve observed how we’re finding more molehills not just on our sloping fields, but also the valley bottom ones, above, where they’re pushing into peaty areas, which are still remarkably free of the all-pervasive Soft rush, Juncus effusus, which is steadily taking over our neighbour’s field just across the stream from the above image.Are moles providing an invaluable system of free, and self-maintained, below the ground, drainage channels with no need for heavy diesel powered equipment, to create them?

See what a British manufacturer of “The Magic Mole” writes;

Why Mole Draining is Important:
The TWB Magic Mole Drainer can play a crucial role in helping to achieve the potential of your soil. On the right soil type and when installed correctly, mole draining can help reduce waterlogging problems substantially. Heavy soils with low rates of water movement need regular drainage to improve soil structure and productivity. The aim of mole draining is to fracture and crack the soil and construct unlined mole channels at consistent depth and even spacing which allow flow paths for water to drain unhindered into gravel filled collector drains or dykes. The TWB Magic Mole skid design allows the leg to fracture and crack the soil without leaving excess surface disturbance, forming a mole channel to a smooth gradient evening out small surface contours and irregularities.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPpxfktuHRY

 

So to recap, the moles increase in numbers. The fields drain better.

But we HATE the moles. We want them gone. We kill the moles. We celebrate our wisdom.

The rain worsens, the fields flood more, the drainage deteriorates.

So we use a heavy tractor. The ground is compacted even more. With a mechanical “Magic Mole” we tunnel artificial mole drains.

To solve the problem.

Never mind whack-a-mole, whacky-or-what?

We’ll try to play the long game here. Use a bit of mole hill soil for compost and deep beds. Rake out a few of the nuisance ones in the hay meadows well before hay cutting time. Value the exercise, and the extra soil aeration the tunnels will create, and seed exposure to light. And germination.

Watch the meadows change, and insects return, and try to leave the moles alone.

Come to think of it, is it a co-incidence that Ireland, which has had no moles since the last ice age, has a sixth of its land surface as peat bog of one sort or another? A greater proportion than any other European country apart from Finland. Click here for a fascinating insight into how Irish bogs formed – largely as a result of early Neolithic farmers making poor decisions about land management, or view the two graphics copied below, with permission from the excellent site http://www.irelandstory.com.

I think if I were a mole, I’d stay hidden.

And in my short sleep breaks and occasional rest from the hard graft of tunnel digging, I’d dream.

Of the ancient mole myths. Wisdom of old, passed down from mother to young pups in those fleeting weeks, before the family dispersed to necessary solitary lives of independence. The times when we were naked. Not just at birth. When our hands were smaller. We were a little bigger and more upright. Most of us couldn’t flex our spines as much, but we didn’t live alone. We were sociable little animals, and enjoyed sunlight and fresh air. And we had proper big eyes, wide open to see the glories of the world around us. We weren’t the butt of jokes, and other animals really liked us, and didn’t try to kill us.

And then I’d wake. And realise it was just a dream.

A mole myth. From far too long ago.

Or maybe not?

_____

27/06/2021:

Midsummer’s past.

The nights are drawing in.

Although the inevitability gnaws away at my consciousness on a dank foggy morning, this year it’s different. Our discussed expectation, as we toiled with the hay last year in the upper meadow, was that in another 2 or 3 years we’d at last have achieved a really floriferous vista, just a decade after we began the journey in 2013. In fact, it’s been surpassed already.

As a reminder, this is what the meadow looked like in June 2014, above and below. A bit of Yellow rattle, Rhinathus minor, some Sorrel, Rumex acetosa, and lots of lush, thick grass. A massive crop of hay for us to remove manually.

And the other images were taken this week.However, such floral carpets present a dilemma.

For me, nothing beats spending time in a meadow like this on a bright, breezy summer’s day. Just wandering, listening and looking.But in our wet weather climate, these are exactly the conditions when one should be contemplating cutting it, if you want the best quality hay.

Leave it longer, and the nutritional value will decline; although leave it longer, and more seed will have been returned to the burgeoning seed bank, to add to diversity in the years ahead.

We’re also very aware in our drive for floral and invertebrate diversity, that leaving the flowers for as long as possible allows more pollen and nectar options during the sometimes significant “June gap”, before the abundance of local bramble and stands of willow herb begin to bloom.Waiting until mid-July, or even better mid-August would be the best compromise, but by then the weather has usually deteriorated, the days are shorter and the chances for us to manually remove the whole crop as dry, usable hay will have diminished dramatically.

So this year after the cold, late spring, we’re prevaricating. The scales are firmly tilted towards inactivity, for now, regardless of the forecasts. Growth is still light, so potentially it’ll be easier to dry the hay out anyway, and we’ll aim to cut the lower wet meadow first.Here the process of restoration to greater diversity is about 3 years behind the upper meadow. This year sees much of the field covered with Yellow rattle, so once a significant percentage of these plants have mature seed forming, a surprisingly quick process in this annual plant, we’ll aim to remove all of this hay before returning to tackle the upper field.And take pot luck with the weather later on.

And enjoy scenes like this for much longer, as the betony and maybe even knapweed, begin to bloom. It looks like the orchid count has now surpassed 300 in the upper meadow, with at least 2 showing near the pond in the lower meadow as well. A near trebling from last year. This short selection of slow scenes from the meadow captures the delights. The movement and sheer scale of flower numbers in just a one acre or so field, is appreciated better.

 

 

If you can, find a local wildflower meadow and visit it, this year, in the next month. And be amazed. See the Coronation Meadows website for details of meadows local to you, and some may be open for visits around National Meadows Day, on the first weekend in July.

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31/07/2021:

Extreme.

A single word, reflecting a manic month, when, with little respite from time spent outside, the charm of putting together a blog post has dissipated in much the same way as water has been sucked from this, now dessicating, land.

It didn’t seem like this was likely at the beginning of July as we waited for another chance to cut more hay, and were thrilled to find our first Greater butterfly orchid flower spike, Platanthera chlorantha, had appeared in our upper hay meadow to join the three hundred or so hybrid heath spotted orchids that have bloomed this year. A dramatic leap in numbers from last year’s hundred or so.Now a relatively uncommon flower in the UK, this later flowering, grassland orchid has suffered hugely from the widespread destruction of traditional floriferous hay meadows over the last 70 years. Its current nationwide distribution can be gleaned from the database and maps held by the National Biodiversity Network – NBN atlas  

There is a generally smaller Lesser butterfly orchid, Platanthera bifolia, which is very similar, but typically has fewer flowers per spike, as well as having the 2 pollen holding pollinia structures positioned in a parallel arrangement, rather than the slightly divergent angled position of this, larger species. More photographic details and examples can be found on the excellent wildflower finder website.

As July began, the weather forecast showed a weather window with 4 sunny dry days, so we cut another large swathe in the lower hay meadow. The following day was perfect haymaking weather – sunny, warm and windy, and I started to think about an algorithm or formula for assessing how quickly one can dry meadow grass from being cut, to fully dry cured hay, depending on these critical factors.Probably a 9 out of 10 day. (In fact two other factors are relevant – how wet the grass, or underlying field is when actually cut, and the strength of the sun – something I’ll come back to later).

Needless to say after this perfect day, which had moved the hay from wet grass to roughly 70% cured within barely 24 hours, the following day both the weather, and the forecasts, had changed. Cool, grey, dank and still. A 0 out of 10 day when nothing one could do in the way of turning had any real effect. The following day was better, but by now the forecasts showed a risk of light rain in the evening so we took the tough decision to bag up nearly fully dry hay, and move it inside.

And then out again the following morning, tipping the contents out for a final airing on a much better day, to be brought inside safely in the evening, 3 days after cutting. A fairly typical haymaking scenario for us for most of the years we’ve been doing this.

3 more seasonal events coincided with this frenetic human activity. On the first sunny day in July, the Narrow-bordered five-spot burnet moths, Zygaena lonicerae, emerged in the wet meadow, though in small numbers, and immediately began feeding from the mass of Common valerian, Valeriana officinalis, flowers which now are spreading through the wetter, uncut section of this meadow.On a sunny day the scent from these is really lovely and distinctive, though I don’t have a sufficiently well developed vocabulary or finely tuned nose to be able to describe it.It’s followed through the month with the sublime scent of freshly mown Sweet vernal grass hay, Meadowsweet, numerous rambling roses, and latterly the very distinctive scent of ripening orchid seed capsules, which I’ll attempt to describe as having a smell not dissimilar to horse dung!A strangely farmyard smell, dissimilar to any other plant material I’ve encountered to date.

But back to the burnet moths, and it was only later when looking at the images and video clips on the bigger screen, that I spotted at least 3 bright orange mites on this recently emerged moth. I can’t find any reference to them on line, but guess that they’re parasitic, but wonder just what their life cycle might be? Do they attach to the moth after it emerges from its pupa, or have they developed inside the pupal case, in the way that the honeybee’s Varroa mites breed on the developing juvenile bees? Although the Varroa mite development process takes place within the capped cell structure of the wax comb. In the case of the moth, the caterpillar does spin a silk cocoon attached to a leaf stem, within which the pupal stage metamorphosis takes place. Might the mite live within this, or even within the pupa itself? Who knows?

The second seasonal event was finding the first small red waxcap mushrooms which always appear early, in this very wet area of field, close to the pond. I’ve always struggled with a definitive species identification for these, though Hygrocybe glutinipes var. rubra, or H. phaococcinea seem the most likely.

And finally, the first brood of swallow chicks flew from the barn, and unusually, this year chose the ridge tiles of the house as the perfect place to rest whilst busy parents flew sorties collecting insects to feed their hungry offspring.

We’ve also been able to enjoy the developing flower and seed head scenes in our upper hay meadow, having opted to cut the majority of this only after the lower meadow had been completely cleared.This really merits another short You Tube, to illustrate just how floriferous and what a huge pollen and nectar source a traditional hay meadow can be. Should you feel so inclined, there’s a recent on line petition initiative, jointly hosted by the 3 British charities Plantlife, Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and Butterfly Conservation, to try to raise awareness amongst politicians of the merits of encouraging more traditional meadow grasslands, particularly for their potential for locking up carbon. Click here for Grasslands Plus.

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Eventually, on July 12th, the weather patterns and forecasts seemed to change. A high pressure system was building, so with the sort of sceptical enthusiasm driven by years of false haymaking weather forecasts, I opted to cut the remaining half of our lower meadow mid-afternoon, in spite of cool, overcast skies.This is about the maximum I’ll chance at any one time, partly because it’s quite a demanding physical job using our Powerscythe.But partly because we know that all this cut hay will need a lot of manual work over and above cutting before any hay is safely stashed away. Given the benign forecasts, in spite of the cool, still grey day of cutting, we opted to manually spread the hay, just a couple of hours after cutting.

To add to the labour, some of this yellow rattle rich area was shifted as green hay to manually spread onto some of the field margins where we’d yet to establish this vital hemi-parasitic plant.

But at last the weather was settling, temperatures were rising, the sun appeared and soon swathes were being cut in the top field too. Then the novel, amber weather warning was flagged up for “extreme heat” by the Met Office.Only introduced for the first time in the UK this June, it was nevertheless unexpected that this should have been applied for South and mid Wales, the South West and an area of the West Midlands.

In fact the temperature guide was an underestimate. On a run of days, the lack of wind meant that Ventusky’s perceived temperatures were more accurate peaking in the low ’30’s.

The consequence was that although the hay really only needed turning once a day, and there was no risk of rushing to bring it in ahead of rain, lugging 4 bags of green hay down into the lower meadows, for each of 5 swathes cut, together with the physical work involved in raking out, bagging up, and dragging to the hay shed was pretty demanding in these conditions.As well as the staggered manual watering necessary to stave off fatalities in many plants by now suffering from 3 out of 4 exceptionally dry months.

Thank goodness that by chance I’d discovered ‘The Hay Pusher’ fairly early on in our haymaking efforts this year. Watch this short video and glance at some of the comments afterwards!

 

 

We discussed buying the sort of curved muck fork the ‘star’ used in this, and wondered just how well it would work on our slope, and with our heavier hay crops. Fortunately Fiona had the brainwave of trying the technique with our hay rakes, by simply flipping the rake over, and using it peg side up.

Bingo.

http://https://youtu.be/j9-icRiBeO4

A huge time and effort saver, not only in quickly bringing the windrows into huge piles. But also that these piles could then be stuffed into the big bags in a fraction of the time and effort that was needed when doing it “the old way”, by simply raking the rows into smaller mounds, and lifting each one laboriously into the bag.

Even so, tackling a couple of swathes, and maybe stuffing 16 big bags at a time, was an evening job which left us dripping, and we rattled through vast quantities of chilled bottled water to avoid heat exhaustion and dehydration. Coming inside for a strip shower and sitting in front of a fan for 5 minutes to cool down, and often playing a couple of songs from Mark Knopfler’s wonderful Tracker CD, discovered by me in lockdown last year. And usually beginning with the consecutive chill out tracks “The Lights of Taormina”, and “Silver Eagle”, composed by Knopfler as tributes to Bob Dylan, who he toured with on a couple of occasions. Masterful, richly layered melodic songs, from an aging star.

 

 

 

 

We didn’t need to be in Sicily, with all this Welsh heat and sunshine, the music took us there, and once internal temperatures and calm were restored, I could face an evening with the hose.

And all this before another genuinely great idea from Fiona saw us having to clear out perhaps 40 big bags worth of old hay from one of the hay sheds, and dragging the big bags to disperse the old hay around the property, before we could fit all the new crop of hay inside, and still squeeze the BCS in.

This effort came as the “extreme heat” weather was peaking, so needed 6.00 am starts, and working until about 10.00am, at which point all physical work was really too risky, so my efforts switched to watering, seed collection and spreading, and equally benign garden related tasks. Below is a tub of selected, special hand collected mixed seeds, collected from a few parent plants in the garden and spread thinly at a slow walking pace back and forth across the cleared swathes of meadow.A real range from natives like Pignut, Cowslip, Cat’s-ear, Geranium pratense and G. sylvaticum to Camassia, Erodium and Crocus. Few will probably survive, but who knows, the meadow may be even more colourful in years to come over a longer season.

Quite how anyone copes with temperatures around 49 degrees C, which is what was being experienced in Baghdad and Basra, according to the excellent Ventusky.com, around the same time, is beyond me. But this is just the latest in a run of extreme weather events from around the globe this year as yet more evidence that our climate is behaving in an increasingly erratic and worrying way. Click here for a review of Canadian wildfires, and here for a review of the catastrophic flooding in Belgium and Germany, as well as London’s increased risk of more severe flooding within a decade.

As a further example of just how hot it was, here are two photos of surface temperature readings from our washing line spiral which capture the temperatures reached around midday in full sunshine. 59 degrees C on the crushed slate, and ‘just’ 50 degrees C on the old quarry tiles. This highlights part of the reason for the spiral conundrum of differential snow melt which we sometimes see on this garden feature in winter. It also illustrates the significant power of insolation – the impact of the sun’s radiation falling directly onto a surface, and creating temperatures way above the ambient level. For a very simple overview of the factors involved in insolation, click here. Perhaps materials for hard landscaping, or building cladding will in future need to be assessed much more seriously for their potential contributions to the heating of most urban environments, which are, historically, hard surface rich.

A striking feature of the extreme heat days, was just how pleasantly cool the environment was in the woody areas, not only because of shade, but also no doubt linked to the ability of transpiring vegetation to cool itself down with evaporating water from its leaves?

Perhaps we should all keep more Sarracenia indoors, to control fly populations. Not only do they work effectively, they seem to suck up and evaporate water at a phenomenal rate, coming as they do from boggy environments in North America, where water is plentiful. And this evaporation must also have a cooling effect, sucking out energy from the room to change the physical state of water from liquid to vapour. (The heat of vaporisation of water is higher than any other known liquid).Rather late in the heatwave, I played with this same concept by directing a simple 15 watt fan at the damp lime wash layer around our un-insulated section of stone wall around the inglenook to make use of this phenomenon. Though fortunately our insulated stone cave house stayed benignly cool, at least downstairs, through the whole period. How strange that we’ve enjoyed the pleasant cork and lime hemp plaster insulated environment of our house over many winters, and only now realise how beneficial it will also be in extreme heat events in years to come.

Heat or cold? Moist or dry air? Still air or ventilation? And given current ideas and research on winter respiratory viruses and keeping our respiratory tracts in good working order, I wonder how long it’ll be before the supertanker of current British building practice gets turned around?

As a final observation, here are two photos from the magic terrace garden around midday in full sun, firstly on the crushed slate (62 degrees C), secondly on the adjacent vegetation, (34 degrees C) showing just how effective low, densely planted, water evaporating surfaces can be at mitigating the sun’s enormous insolation power.

Severed of its links to water uptake from the roots, this is, obviously, why insolation onto a slope on a sunny day can convert wet grass to hay so very quickly.

No wonder that most of the garden and landscape fell eerily quiet from around mid- morning to late afternoon.Like us, the bees had to start early and continue into late evening. Midday meant chilling out.

Although the image below, taken early one morning as we toiled with the old hay before things got too hot for us, indicated that if you were a grasshopper, maybe you perceived this extreme heat in a different way?

Did it climb, or jump onto the knapweed bud? It sat there motionless for minutes, while I grabbed my camera from inside, but five minutes later, it had vanished.

30/06/2022:

Two days after the first swarm and by now feeling back to normal, after Omicron, our three different eagerly scanned weather forecasts showed a weather window opening for haymaking. Always now a wrench when the meadows look as lovely as this:

 

 

So I began the cutting with a small, relatively flower-free perimeter section in the upper meadow, and continued cutting the least floriferous parts of the lower meadow. By now both meadows were looking stunning, and it was already obvious that the upper meadow’s orchid count was approaching about 500 this year, with several defined patches with 20 to 30 flowers, singletons dotted around widely, and the most numerous zone with over 200 flowers in a concentrated block.The weather this year has been wonderful for pollination and seed formation, as indeed it was in 2021, so given a new orchid takes several years to flower, I’m expecting flower counts to easily pass the thousand mark within a couple of years, and who knows, beyond that, given I continue to swerve around orchid flowers or seed capsules with the power scythe, then hand collect and puff the dust-like seed out later in the year all around the property.

The Eyebright, Euphrasia spp, is also having a bumper year, with sheets of the tiny flowers as a sublayer through much of the meadow. All this hay was safely brought in with no real weather pressure for once, before some forecast light rain fell, and then after a convenient short break, we could cut and bring in the remaining lower meadow in an extended wonderful 4-day blitz of perfect hay making weather – brisk winds with warm sunshine.So for once, by the longest day, we already have nearly enough quality hay to get our sheep through next winter and are still left with much of the flower-filled top meadow to process in bits and pieces, and just enjoy in the meantime.

This has also allowed us once again to cut some for 4 Big Bags of green hay as a seed source for some garden visitors from 2021, who’d expressed an interest and are working on their own wildflower meadow. They’ll return in a few weeks for a second cut and collect session, which will catch a different range of later flowering species.

Our aim is to continue with our green hay transfer again from upper to lower meadow later this year, so that from 2023 both meadows should start to become really diverse floral communities. Should any locally based readers be interested in some green hay from this field to begin their own small or larger wild flower meadow project, then do get in touch a.s.a.p. before it all gets removed for this year!

We’re toying with the idea of holding a workshop for very limited numbers of interested people next year which would allow discussion of wildflower meadow restoration principles and the practicalities of how to do it, some typical meadow plant identification; the opportunity to harvest and take home some green hay, along with a consideration of the vital role of pollinators and the best plants to grow in a garden to help support them, throughout the year. With maybe even a short discussion on low intervention honeybee hive establishment. Numbers would be very limited – I’m guessing a maximum of 4 to 6 on just a few occasions, and the sessions would have to be arranged at short notice in suitable weather, but anyone vaguely interested could get in touch  with us (see here for details) to go on a waiting list for more information if it happens.

A chance discovery led to some new favoured post haymaking music this year, from the French singer ZAZ. There’s something about her distinctive voice, its clarity and the catchy rhythms and melodies. We both loved every track from her latest album, ISA, though this is probably my favourite. My French is very poor, and I had to check out the translation of the lyrics for this song, though helpfully, they’re included as subtitles on this video:

 

 

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24/07/2022:

The Met Office described it, not unreasonably, as a milestone in UK climate history and has some interesting graphics to illustrate why they used this phrase, and how it’s yet another example of how weather extremes are oscillating ever more violently.

“A new record daily maximum temperature for the UK was provisionally reached on 19 July, with 40.3°C recorded at Coningsby, Lincolnshire, exceeding the previous record by 1.6°C. A total of 46 stations across the UK exceeded the previous UK record of 38.7°C. Many long-running stations with 100+ year records recorded their highest ever temperature, some by extraordinary margins of 3 to 4°C… New provisional national temperature records were also set for Wales and Scotland. On 18 July, 37.1°C was recorded at Hawarden Airport, Flintshire.”

All the dry sunny weather has, aside from this critical spell, been wonderful and made haymaking once again a fairly benign and drawn-out affair, with many opportunities to continue to spread green hay around our remaining meadows to boost floral diversity.

But not before spending part of a gorgeous day on July 10th wandering around with the camera to capture what the upper meadow looked like as it reached its mid-summer peak.

 

 

The process of green hay spreading is quite labour intensive, but at least now the donor seed source is expanding exponentially, after a year like this with wonderful insect pollination opportunities – it’s really just the orchid seed capsules, pignut, and a few new select plants currently in very low numbers, that I bother collecting manually. There’s already plenty of yellow rattle, eyebright, ribwort plantain and cat’s ears widely distributed across our 2 hay meadows.

I thought I was doing well with meadow floral diversity until Fiona and I joined a small bunch of members from Carmarthenshire Meadows Group, on a visit to one of the tenant farmers who manage upland hay meadows surrounding the Elan valley reservoirs.

We were extremely fortunate to have as our guide Sorcha Lewis, who as well as living on the farm for many years, has a background as being an Elan Valley ranger, and is incredibly knowledgeable about both the history of the landscape, and the variety of plants found within just two of her fairly small meadows we visited, which are cut for hay each year. They run down to the banks of the reservoirs, which were surprisingly empty, partly due to maintenance and the lack of recent rain, and showing some of the foundations of farmhouses that flooded all those years ago.

The lakes were created in Victorian times when the land was purchased to build dams, a pipeline, and flooding the valleys to provide a water supply to the enlarging, distant conurbation of Birmingham. A major construction project, the first phase opened in 1904, and because of the height of the water source, it supplies water by gravity feed alone.

Sorcha explained that initially the surrounding farmers were all scheduled to have been evicted until the water company realised that without management, the land would quickly deteriorate, so for the last 120 years, the landscape has remained largely unchanged with no artificial fertilisers, and limited muck being permitted on the fields surrounding the lakes. The consequence is that the pasture has been spared much of the “improvement” advocated and instituted on other traditional upland farms, and so these meadows maintain an amazing diversity, typical of what would have been commonplace, pre-1950.

My guess is that many of the tourists who drive or walk around the lakes would glance into a field like this, and not appreciate just how special it is, but with Sorcha as our guide, we soon realised that what looked at first glance very similar to our own meadow, was actually full of special, and in some cases very rare, botanical gems, as illustrated in some of the photos above. I’ve not seen many of these flowers before, or certainly not in a hay meadow – Meadow thistle, Cirsium dissectum, Greater burnet, Sanguisorba officinalis, Globe flower, Trollius europaeus, Fragrant orchid, Gymnadenia conopsea, Saw-wort, Serratula tinctoria, Bog asphodel, Narthecium ossifragum, Butterwort, Pinguicula vulgaris, Tufted Vetch,Vicia cracca,Milkwort, Polygala vulgaris, Mountain pansy, Viola lutea.

 

So we returned with renewed enthusiasm, to our own meadows.We may already be 9 years into the project, but turning back the clock to re-create a wildflower meadow isn’t a sprint, but more a marathon. Many thanks to Sorcha for acting as our guide, for her inspirational landscape and fields, and to Andrew for organising the trip.

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02/06/2023:

Sun, Sun, Sun.

I’m sure I’ve used Rain, Rain, Rain in a blog post title before, but possibly not Sun, Sun, Sun. It’s been a fabulous 3 weeks here in West Wales, with wonderful sunny days without getting too hot – rarely above 20 degrees C, and managing to avoid any late frosts. By the end of the month, I was thinking that it was the best spell of weather I can recall here.

However, my memory clearly is failing – May 2020 was even sunnier, and even drier, coming after a very dry April, though I notice after reviewing my “Garden Views” page for that month, that we did have minus 3 degrees C  frosts, which played havoc with some early vegetables.I guess that the fact that other things were going on in the world then, and we were in even more of an isolated bubble than usual, has influenced my memory.

No matter, I’ll begin with a selection of images from around the garden and meadows in recent weeks. There’s not much to add – the garden has looked wonderful, with many areas looking as good as they’ve ever looked. perhaps only some of the Clematis montana, and the deciduous Azaleas haven’t flowered quite as well as they often do.

This year, the upper hay meadow has transformed itself again, jumping up a gear or two with more widespread floral diversity.After years of manually saving and hand scattering seeds of “special” flowers across the field, the effort has evidently paid off. Pignut now seems to be established across much of the meadow, clusters of orchids are popping up in many new places, and we seem to be past peak yellow rattle over much of the meadow – about 11 years after we began this floral re-introduction project. As I write I’m pondering when to cut our first hay, the dilemma being the weather is perfect for manual haymaking, but we really can’t bear to cut any of the floriferous bits.I’ll probably start with some peripheral sections in the lower meadow since we can’t afford to risk trying to remove it all later in the year in a rush – we’re just too limited in stamina these days.

Sometime soon, I’ll try to complete a short YouTube to illustrate how the upper meadow looked in late May/early June since it changes daily. We’re pleased we’ve already had a few visitors who’ve been able to share special moments in the garden during the last week, including a first visit by A&J who arrived at 11.30 a.m, for a birthday treat visit, bringing a picnic lunch and didn’t leave until about 4.30 pm – so we seem to be exceeding the National Garden Scheme (NGS) requirement for a garden with sufficient interest to keep visitors engaged for about 45 minutes!

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As well as my occasional blog posts, much time this year has gone into my Garden Views pages, YouTube compilations, and an attempt to record what we’ve actually been doing around the property, on a Gardening Year page, as a prompt for us in future years, and as a possible aide-memoire for whoever takes over stewardship of this special place in the years ahead.

Any readers interested in visiting to see the meadows in their current glory, or indeed interested in a bag of green hay for seeds from the upper meadow – the next 5 weeks is probably prime time for viewing them, or perhaps 9 weeks for green hay collection, from mid-June.

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30/06/2023:

What will we remember from June 2023 in 20 years? Will we still be around, or even have the power of recall?Will I remember the sublime morning spent up in the shepherd’s hut? The timer set. The trickling sand forgotten as I absorb this scene.

The words are there but penned too soon to reference the tragedy which followed a day later.When in a moment of stupidity and poor timing one of our two ram lambs jumped the low fence in search of foliage, got stuck in the mud that passes for what’s left of our pond in this drought-affected land, and drowned. Perhaps we even heard his desperate fleeting bleats as we sat on the terrace enjoying a balmy morning coffee, as we have for most of the last two months. Or maybe it was just his sibling’s anxious call as he sought reassurance now that his brother was gone. The sound was so unusual I’d looked down into the distant field and watched a lamb anxiously walking along the stream’s bank, apparently bleating. We found him barely an hour later, after a regular walk and number count. Memories of advent colours from December 2016 – a different season, but the same sinking feeling.

The same slow, sinking end:

Mulled wine, mince pies, and Aberglasney’s bustling fair

Are soon forgotten as I scour the field,

Recount, and listen, again. One short, and ominously

Silent as the settled flock, dispersed, fleck the scene

In black and white. Stark colours as

Foreboding settles, stomach deep.

Help is summoned.

 

Fiona found her, hidden behind some rushes…

Not what we’d anticipated when we planned a simple wildlife pond all those years ago, and our only 2 older sheep fatalities to date have happened in this way.

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After they’d all left, I noticed that the doors and windows to the shepherd’s hut were still open, so wandered up after supper to close them, and spotted the very rare sight of a healthy-looking hedgehog wandering in golden light through the meadow grass. I guess that hedgehogs have been struggling both for food and water these past weeks, and after seeing it in the same area of the garden a few days later, looking less active, we left a low container filled with water for it.

I was fascinated by how unperturbed by my presence it was, although, at one point, it paused, sniffed the air, turning its head slowly through 90 degrees, until its nose (and eyes) were pointing directly at me. Briefly froze, perhaps we exchanged thoughts, and then the hog decided to wander onto our mown path and quietly amble away.

 

 

There’s an interesting piece on hedgehog sensory perceptions which you can read here, which confirms that their vision is poor and probably of only limited use to them in their normally nocturnal existence.

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Haymaking, strangely, hasn’t been a simple task this year, since although there’s been so much dry weather, much of it has come before there’s been any forage growth worth cutting. We’ve been very fortunate to have some help this year, which might herald an interesting new phase in how we manage the garden and land – more in due course – but for now many thanks to Andy, Debs and John, for coming over and getting stuck into the task despite mid-twenties C heat and often incredibly high humidity.

We were able to supply Andy with some green hay for an interesting project at his new home near the coast, as well as some Crocus tommasinianus seed, and Tenby daffodil, Narcissus obvallaris, bulbs.

The humidity around haymaking is something I haven’t thought about much before, but it’s clearly a factor along with sunshine and the timing of any direct insolation, cloud cover, day and night temperatures, and finally wind speeds which all hugely impact how quickly hay can be made. At least our fields now have a crop which is much lighter and less leafy than in the early years, when trying to manually turn heavy, lush leafy grass was a task which would now be beyond us. So 36 or more usually 48-hour hay is still an option if one turns the grass sufficiently often.

Apparently, typical humidity for Wales lies between 70 and 90% and is normally highest in the winter months. This year, before the storm, I registered humidity as low as 45 % outside – brilliant for haymaking of course, with the additional factor that at such low levels, the chances of dew forming overnight diminish dramatically.

As illustrated by the graph, (and the roof of the car) – in spite of the low humidity, the temperature had dropped from about 20 degrees C in the evening to just 7 in the morning, so a slight dew had still formed by 7.00am.

Heavy dew, even on a sunny hot day is the bane of a haymaker’s life, particularly as we pass mid-summer, since all that moisture has to evaporate before the hay will begin to dry out any more. And such high humidity makes the physical work involved extremely sweat-inducing.

It may have stayed very warm overnight, on this occasion, but with humidity of 90%, it was still likely that dew would form, which indeed it did.

 

We’ve probably already cropped 60% of what we need for next winter, but the upside of this year’s fits and starts hay making has been we’ve had plenty of time and glorious weather to enjoy the hay meadows as they’ve taken another leap forwards.

It made me reflect on whether the joy of experiencing a wildflower meadow in mid-summer comes from the overall view or the detail. The reverse, indeed, of “not being able to see the wood for the trees”.In many ways, although the overall scenes are glorious, it’s when one focuses on the number and diversity of small flowers that the richness and magnitude of the ecosystem hit home. Which is why it took me nearly an hour to walk around the meadow the other morning, at 6.00am, soaking it all up.

The yellow rattle has finally appeared almost ubiquitously in the upper meadow, but in many areas is now waning in quantity. In contrast, the many different forms of eyebright have had a fantastic year, carpeting the sward’s lower level with their tiny, appealing flowers in shades of white and violet.

Orchid numbers have exceeded 500, and are now appearing in the lower meadow, and pignut and pick clover are becoming much more widespread.As I write this up, betony is more common this year, and the first Devil’sbit scabious flowers are already open in the lower and upper meadows.All this hints at an unusual and worrying trend for so many flowers to be open now, weeks before one would expect them to be. The brambles are already beginning to go over, and the Rosebay willowherb is picking up steam.What is going to be left as nectar and pollen options for insects in the latter half of the year? It is possibly not an issue for the honey bees if their stores are brimming, but it could be an issue for later butterflies.

For now, the upper meadow has been awash with Meadow Browns, Maniola jurtina, and the skippers are just appearing in numbers.

So all in all, a rare and very special early summer in West Wales.

Maybe a brief golden age, which will live in the memory for many years.

Unless, perhaps, it becomes the new norm.

 

 

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27/08/2023:

There can be few more unpleasant tasks a sheep owner has to deal with than a case of blowfly strike. Or to use a more scientific term cutaneous myiasis. Or much more simply a case of maggot infestation. Over the years we’ve had the occasional case, usually in very hot humid weather, often quite late in the year. And usually just a single sheep that’s had a slightly mucky rear which has attracted the flies to the smell. The flies lay eggs onto the soiled fleece, the eggs soon hatch into first-stage maggots, which quickly mature, go through 3 larval forms as they rapidly grow and secrete flesh-damaging enzymes. Surprisingly quickly the poor animal can begin to be eaten alive. The initial attack is usually by green bottle flies, Lucilia sericata, and once skin becomes damaged by maggot activity, other flies are attracted to the scene.

Many commercial farmers will routinely treat the whole of their flock with a pour-on insecticidal liquid, these days often containing a synthetic pyrethroid-type chemical. In days gone by, most sheep were dipped with even more toxic chemicals, like organophosphates with even worse safety profiles for livestock, invertebrates and indeed the farmer using it. Permethrins are safer but are still quite broad-spectrum agents that can harm many invertebrates, so on risk-benefit grounds, rather as with the routine use of any anthelmintics (wormers), or indeed vaccines, we stopped using them several years ago for our small, low-density flock. The downside to this is we have to be alert to the telltale early signs of problems – restlessness on the part of the sheep, turning round suddenly and nibbling at a part of the body, and a slight discolouration of the fleece.This year, despite not having really muggy, or hot weather, and even though none of the sheep have any soiling, we’ve recently had one of the worst cases ever. It seems we’re not alone, and this must in part be due to fleeces being saturated for weeks on end. It required two separate sessions of manually clipping back the wool from obviously affected areas, scraping away the small maggots with the dagging shears, and then applying the cypermethrin around the area. In the case of “Hoopoe”, this meant grabbing her at the furthest point of our land, beyond the stream, on a steep slope amongst trees, and bracing myself against a trunk for stability, whilst Fiona did the manual clip-out and treatment. The maggots are killed quite quickly and fall to the ground, but it’s only after doing this that the full extent of the damage becomes apparent. There are no action photos of this – it would be too gruesome for most, and anyway, all efforts and hands are involved in completing the task. (There are plenty of gory images on the link above).

 

By the second day, and after a second treatment application, she was sufficiently improved to be persuaded to leave her shaded, hunkered down “refuge” (except of course, there are no real refuges from the flies), cross the stream, and slowly follow Fiona through the lower meadow towards where we’d moved the rest of the flock for individual checks, clip offs, and preventative applications – in the end half a dozen or so were showing very early signs of a problem.

As we reached the lower hay meadow, which had good aftermath regrowth from our mid-June early hay cut, she suddenly sped up, and after walking about 20 yards past lush grass, stopped for her very first bite at the first clump of ribwort plantain, Plantago lanceolata, she came across. This was the best confirmation of the merits of a real ‘cae ysbyty’, (a traditional Welsh farm ‘hospital field’) that we’ve ever witnessed. An animal self-selecting a plant with known anti-inflammatory pharmacological activity, which I’ve written about before.

When we amalgamated the flock again and moved them all back into this same field, there was more evidence about how the sheep self-select particular plants, in a way they can’t manage in most species poor Welsh upland pasture.

One of the reasons we delay putting them back into this lower meadow for so long is to allow the early form of Devil’s-bit scabious, DBS, (which I’m gradually propagating from seed, and re-introducing as small root-trained plants), to set seed before the sheep come in and snaffle the seed heads.

I’d known for some time that the common name of the plant, Succisa pratensis, is thought to have arisen because of the odd appearance and sudden blunt ending to the black roots. (Succisa = ‘cut down’ underneath, pratensis = ‘meadow’) Almost as though they have been bitten off. Every reference to the plant mentions this, although I couldn’t find a single image to illustrate it. So I thought that I should dig up one of my root-trained plants which had been planted onto our bank of peril this spring, to confirm this. And this is what I found, after washing off most of the soil.Firstly, the roots seem very well-developed and largely white, but secondly, I’d struggle to identify any sections that look as though they’ve been bitten off. Looked at in detail, they are a little unusual in form, at least in places, but hardly enough to make one describe it as it has been historically, as bitten off.

What about the scabious part of the name? Again, it’s often mentioned that for centuries it was used to treat skin inflammation and human scabies – caused by the parasitic mite, Sarcoptes scabiei. And was even used to treat skin sores caused by the bubonic plague. Some sites suggest it has anthelmintic properties, and is a useful immunostimulant. Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54) thought highly of its medicinal properties and wrote “The root was longer until the devil bit it away, envying its usefulness to mankind”.

Eventually, on a site curated by the Royal College of Physicians, Garden of Medicinal Plants, I found this corroborating quote, by Dr Henry Oakley for my apparent debunking of the bitten root etymology: “Folklore attribute it as a cure-all which was so successful that the Devil bit off the bottom of the roots when he saw it growing down into Hades. However, the roots show no sign of such damage to support the myth.” 

It’s surprising how easily myths can come to be perpetuated online, isn’t it? Although it does leave me wondering just why it came to get this common, and scientific (Latin) name. Might its morphology have changed over decades, or might there be variants in other parts of the world, or different conditions, where the root system does looked as though it’s been chomped? Who knows.

 

It takes a bit of digging sometimes to get closer to the truth, perhaps…

Whatever, it seems that the plant’s known medicinal attributes certainly merit it having a place in our cae ysbyty, aside from its tremendous aesthetic and invertebrate interest.

HOWEVER. I think something else which is very curious about this plant may indeed still irk the devil in more contemporary times.

While separate sexes are thought of as the norm in much of the animal world, they are the exception in flowering plants.

It turns out that DBS is one of a very small population of angiosperm species (all flowering plants) which is gynodioecious (a new word for me). These odd angiosperms (I decided against using the adjective queer) produce both typical hermaphrodite flowers (as most flowers are, with both male pollen-producing anthers and female stigmas leading to ovaries and ovules for seed production)  AND also produce, on the same plant – not separate ones – flowers that simply have entirely female structures, the male parts of these flowers having been aborted.

Taxonomists have discovered that such plants, of which there are maybe only 2% of the total number of flowering plants, are widely distributed throughout the genera of flowering plants and tend to be in the terminal branches of plant evolutionary development. There are only about 6% of plants that are dioecious, with separate male and female flowers produced on different plants.

Many plant genera will just have a few species with these gynodioecious characteristics. This led evolutionary biologists to speculate that the mutations responsible for these peculiar traits have emerged on multiple separate occasions. But it’s thought that the ‘gynodioecy–dioecy pathway’ is one of the most important evolutionary routes from hermaphroditism to separate sexes in life on earth.

Even more curious, is how this process is thought to occur. Most of the scientific papers I dipped into were pretty incomprehensible to me, and the simplest, no doubt dumbed down, explanation that I read I’m including in part below (albeit slightly re-written by me for clarity). This explains just what a battle is going on at a cellular level:

“Gynodioecy develops as a result of a genetic mutation that stops a plant from producing pollen, but still allows normal female reproductive features to exist.

In all plants, the cell’s nuclear genes are inherited from both parents, but all the cytoplasmic genes come from the mother. This allows male sex cells (gametes) to be smaller and more motile while female gametes are larger. It makes sense for most plants to be hermaphrodites since they can’t move around and so are unable to find mates as easily as animals can.

Cytoplasmic male sterility genes exist, usually found in the mitochondrial genome, and become established when female fertility is just slightly more than the hermaphroditic fertility. Research has shown that in typical hermaphroditic plants, there are constant battles against organelle genes trying to kill their male parts. Male sterility genes can cause plants to grow anthers that are stunted or withered and as a result, do not produce pollen. In most plants, however, there are also nuclear fertility-restoring genes that counteract the work of the male sterility genes, maintaining the hermaphroditic state of the plant.

However, in just a few species of plants, the male sterility genes win the battle over the nuclear fertility restoring genes, and gynodioecy occurs.”

So it seems that in DBS, the plant’s male sterility genes have indeed won the battle, at least partially, and gynodioecy with female flowers, with shrivelled anthers, has become possible.

Who would have thought all this complex biochemistry and genetics underpinned such a beautiful range of native flowers with such wide insect appeal and replete with pharmacologically active chemicals of benefit to many animals.

But maybe, just maybe, in today’s world where I struggle to comprehend the extent to which gender issues in Homo sapiens seem to be an ever-present, inescapable subject of debate, the devil might have the last laugh. And decide to do a better job this time, and really get to grips with the DBS roots.

Or then again, why wouldn’t he/she/it just leave things as they are.

And smirk.

Interestingly, other meadow plants including some plantains, and also Geranium sylvaticum, which I first saw growing in meadows in Northumberland are also gynodioecious.Before finally leaving the vexed subject of DBS, and at risk of being considered to be a little DBS obsessed of late, I can relate another special moment when I was fixated on a single small DBS flower at the margin of our lower wet meadow this week.

I’d walked past it as one of a group of DBS plants I’d planted out a year ago along the ditch margin, to be certain that they wouldn’t get scythed off when the hay was cut.

My eye was caught by a distinctive white crab spider, Misumena vatia, sitting atop this flower, with its front legs spread wide, waiting to grab a passing insect rash enough to land on the flower. As I moved past, my shadow crossed it, and it quickly scuttled beneath the flower head to a degree of safety.

I walked on, and turning back after a few yards, spotted it moving back onto the flower head. I was a little surprised it had ventured back into full view so quickly, and more carefully moved closer to take a few clearer photos. As I had the viewfinder to my eye, and with the lowering sun behind me, I was amazed to see it change its posture, stick its pointed abdominal tip into the air in an almost Ian Fleming-like SPECTRE posture, and quite suddenly and rapidly emit an orgasmic multi-strand burst of silk fibres, which diverged and glinted in the sunlight.

The light breeze moved these around a bit, and the spider then changed its position, and fairly quickly began to tweak the silk fibres with its front set of legs, which were now held to its front.It repeated this pattern of quite regular rotation on the flower head, silk squirts and reeling in, over many minutes.In a few photos, you can even make out a small bundle of silk, gathered beneath its head. What on earth was going on?I’d never seen anything like it and began to wonder if the spider was using the fibres a bit like a fishing line – casting them out, and hauling them in, hoping to have caught a small insect.

Was it indeed a crab spider, or some other species, although it looked just like crab spiders I’ve occasionally seen before. But they’ve always sat completely still on the flower, using stealth to catch their prey.

In the end, some recent research at Bristol University which I tracked down explained it all, beautifully. It was after all a crab spider, but it wasn’t trying to catch food – indeed it had ignored two potential meals whilst I was crouched still, photographing it.

Rather it seems it had decided it was time to move on.

Or more specifically, that it was time to take to the air, in what I now know is referred to as ballooning. Do watch the EXCELLENT video included by the researchers at Bristol in this published paper about their study. (Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders, by Erica Morley and Daniel Robert). It’s a very readable piece, with some nice footage and graphics, which I can’t embed directly in this post.

They’ve worked out that small but significant changing electrostatic forces in the air can be detected by tiny hairs on spiders’ legs, and when the winds are light (as they were on this afternoon), and there is sufficient electrostatic charge in the air, they’ll adopt the characteristic tip toe posture above. They then emit the multi-strand silk which is kept apart and drawn from the spider’s spinnerette organs so fast precisely because of these electrostatic charges. Then, with good fortune, the spider will be dragged off the flower, becoming airborne, and potentially travelling thousands of metres into the air, and depending on the wind direction, could be relocated hundreds of miles away.Sadly my failing camera battery and painful knee meant I hadn’t stayed long enough to see if this actually happened.

 

 

The following morning I returned to check both the sheep, and the flower, and to see whether the spider was still there. It wasn’t. Checking the prevailing wind direction and speeds at the time I’d witnessed this behaviour showed that if it had been dragged upwards, there’s an outside chance it might have made it to France. Or more likely South East Wales, Bristol or even London.

But who knows, maybe it landed just on the other side of the valley. Or had been eaten by a hungry predator. However, managing to witness and photograph the actual moment of multi-stream explosive shot-silk ranks as one of my very special sightings in all our time here. Piecing together what was actually going on, and discovering a spider’s ability to detect these charges was even more amazing.

And it also made me speculate on how other insect behaviour might be influenced by such electrostatic charges. In what’s been a really poor summer for our honey bees’ ability to forage for nectar and pollen, we’re approaching a time of the year, when the robbing of honey from colonies becomes likely. One colony was already showing signs of failing after many of the workers and their productive queen swarmed into the empty German butter churn box box earlier in the year. I even wondered if this hive, fixed up a larch tree, had itself been taken over by another small swarm a few weeks ago. Whatever had happened, wasps had already clearly been gaining access in small numbers for the last 10 days, without obvious signs of active defence. Yesterday morning, despite the drizzle, it was suddenly violently robbed out by a large invasion of bees from a colony somewhere, possibly off our land.

Meanwhile an hour after I’d seen the crab spider, I was hunting for more clear examples of female DBS flowers (they don’t seem as common as the hermaphrodite ones) in the upper hay meadow, and trying to get some nice photos of a common carder bumblebee, Bombus pascuorum, visiting them.

When out of the blue I got charged and buzzed by an angry honey bee. This was the first time this had happened to me in months, and I was well away and out of sight of any of the hives. Might this just have been a result of increased tension with the closest hive, because of wasp attacks? And a hyped-up guard bee exploring well beyond the hive entrance for potential threats? Or might the level of electrostatic charge in the air which the spider had obviously detected been responsible for an increased state of agitation?

Who knows, but I retreated in haste from this unprovoked attack and pondered how insensitive we are to such subtleties of the environment around us, compared with these “lower” forms of life that have to survive and thrive outside in these tricky and fickle local conditions. 

A final DBS-related episode was a new species of hoverfly found here which was regularly working the row of DBS flowers where I’d seen the spider the afternoon before.Behaving and looking just like a B. pascuorum, this is an appropriately named Furry Peat hoverfly, Sericomyia (Arctophila) superbiens.  It’s largely restricted in distribution to the West and North of the UK and has a larval form that probably – no one is certain – lives in peaty puddles in damp, acid parts of the country. It’s typically on the wing late in the year and prefers visiting DBS flowers as one of its favourite food sources.

In between all this excitement (well it makes a change from moaning about the weather), we managed, just, to take another section of hay from our upper meadow in another very brief half-weather window – yet again 48 hour hay only possible as a result of multiple turnings and help once more on the final day from Andy (thanks again Andy!) in pushing it all into big piles, before Fiona and I rushed to bring it in, mid-afternoon, as the sunshine-all-day forecast had morphed into heavy clouds, and showers threatened once more.

One spin-off of the haymaking was me getting up early on the final, glorious and supposedly hot sunny day, to a fabulous scene of mist in the valleys and sunlight shafting through the trees along the green lane.

30/04/2024:

 

A slightly warmer day had found me once more up amidst the daffodils taking photos and measurements of some of the latest cultivars to open. I spotted a small, pristine solitary mining bee resting up on a daffodil flower. Then another. Then two more. They were, if not everywhere, then certainly in large numbers and were so unphased by me that I assume they must have all emerged in the sunshine and relative warmth that morning. I even had to rescue two which had fallen into a small pool of rainwater trapped in one of the biomass pellet bags containing daffodils waiting to be planted out. I had a go at identifying the bees, but gave up – probably an Andrena species.

We lifted the daffodils in the bags last year, splitting overcrowded clumps and it’ll soon be time to empty the bags, split the bulbs and plant them into newly prepared patches to enhance the display next year. This will be quite a task, since after an hour of effort, with Willam’s help, lugging them into place, I counted we have over 80 bags to process. That’s a lot of bulbs.

This task was in addition to a serious effort by W and I to sort out aberrant daffodils in this Malus/Sorbus copse. Since the medium-term plan is to create a comparative display showcasing different cultivars in clumps, the effect is spoiled if a few ‘wrong ‘uns’ are lurking amidst the uniformity of one form. To help with this tedious job, which continued over several weeks as more flowers opened and I discovered more imposters, I bought a new spade!

Described as a Spear and Jackson ‘tub draining tool‘ it looked to have the sort of profile I wanted. It’s proved to be a boon, since it’s narrow, curved, heavy and deep, which means it can get in amongst adjacent bulbs and can be dug in with arm effort only, rather than having to use your foot and knee flexion to drive the spade into the ground – far more awkward in a group of flowering bulbs.

The spade depth has allowed me to lift all except one bulb in a plug of turf without digging too shallowly and damaging too many bulb roots. A similarly shaped circular plug of turf can also easily be removed from the new planting spot, and the lifted daff plonked in with minimal disruption. In years to come as clumps become crowded, this spade will also prove invaluable for lifting and splitting, I think. This issue is never much of a problem with snowdrops since the bulbs are invariably smaller and nearer the surface.

The daffodils have been a delight in this possibly record-breakingly gloomy April.

This is my very variable sequence of rainfall and PV inverter totals, a great guide to light levels, since 2014:

136.9mm – N/A

34mm – 519 KWH

108mm – 394 KWH

47mm – 410 KWH

158mm – 346 KWH

94mm – 416KWH

50mm – 498 KWH

19mm – 522 KWH

53mm – 420 KWH

111mm – 393 KWH.

2024:  241 mm – 301 KWH – a record high, a record low!

I’m including a short video compilation I’ve managed to put together of some of late March’s daffodils.

 

 

Finding so many solitary bees very close to one of our honey bee colonies was a particular delight since it’s often claimed that honey bees negatively impact other solitary bee populations. Spot the differences below – the honey bee is the last image. The only bee, apart from bumblebees, in the UK, with specially adapted pollen collecting baskets, or corbicula, on the hind leg.

A few days later I located a colony of a different larger mining bee in a small area to the South of a few birch trees in our lower meadow. And an ashy mining bee in our upper hay meadow. They seem to be thriving, along with the even smaller species which survive amongst our cobbled paths, and also became active for the first time this year, over the last 10 days.

For the last couple of years, we’ve tried to cut the wet, peaty zone of our lower hay meadow, (which is never cut during summer), in the late spring in one of the extended spells we always get in late February or March. And use this as an excellent soft, absorbent bedding material for our lambing pens. Except this year we haven’t had any such dry spells, so we exhausted our bedding and had to shift to old leftover hay from our 2022 harvest.

The purple moor grass, Molinia caerulea, which yields the wonderful bleached dry leaves by late winter and is so typical of such ‘rhos’ pasture, has now begun to grow its new season green leaves. And the ground is still too wet for our BCS power scythe to take into this area. However, a chance manual pull of some bleached leaves as I walked past a few days ago, showed that they were very loose. A trial raking out of an area with our wooden hay rakes followed and was so successful, that we quickly manged to cover most of the area, and in so doing have a store of well over a year’s worth of bedding for next year. The bags will be emptied in the now cleared space in one of our hay sheds – minimal effort, gentle exercise, a useful by product of an ‘unproductive’ bit of land, which eventually gets recycled once more after rotting down in a muck heap as a turf suppressant in our daffodil/crab apple/Sorbus copse, prior to bulb planting, as illustrated above..

Even better, by removing this dead material from the rhos pasture zone of the meadow, it’s allowed the great diversity of flowering plants – Valerian, Meadowsweet, Celandines, Marsh Violets, Devil’s-bit Scabious, Lady’s Smock, etc. which are growing amongst the moor grass, to suddenly see the full light of day. They can now grow away more easily at this critical time of the year.

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16/06/2024:

The recently compiled Met Office climate summary for May, and spring 2024 confirms my own limited observations. Once again records have been broken for the highest mean daily temperatures in a series dating back to 1884. But this was mainly achieved by much higher than normal nighttime temperatures – many days have been surprisingly cool. And also surprisingly dull – the lowest monthly May PV record we’ve recorded in 14 years. Rainfall, although average for May, has been sufficient over the preceding months for soil moisture levels to still be very high for this time of the year.

However, what is most striking to me is not this data, or even the excellent colour-coded maps which the Met Office generate of temperatures, sunlight and rainfall, for the whole of the UK. No, most dramatic is what I’m observing as I walk around the garden and our two wild flower hay meadows. The flower stem growth has never been as tall, for both early grasses, and now meadow buttercups and orchids, and we’ve never had as many flowers at this early part of the season. The normally short Sweet Vernal grass, (Anthoxanthum odoratum), flower stems are as tall as my hip in places – completely unprecedented. Perhaps 25 to 30% taller than normal. The wonderful red common sorrel flower heads, Rumex acetosa, are nearly chest height. Some of our Thalictrum are heading towards nearly 9 feet.

The overall effect in the meadows is a visual aesthetic treat. Very difficult to capture with still images though. The sheer numbers of flowers are a huge boon for the many insects that now use our hay meadows, and in turn for the birds that feed on them. Thanks to my persistence with pee dribbling around both fields, we’ve had no significant turf ripping by badgers looking for chafer grubs over the autumn and winter, and the last ten days have seen large numbers of the emerged adult garden chafers taking flight and whirring through and between the tall stems, whenever any sun breaks through the clouds.

It’s at this time that our 3 resident swallows descend and spend most of their time overflying this field, skimming just above waist height. A chafer must make a very nutritious meal, and having such a rich resource so close to their nests in our barn, where the first chicks have now hatched, must make life much easier for them. All of which encourages me to pound the fields as part of a regular routine, since another observation this year, is an apparent lack of rabbits, or signs of rabbit damage anywhere. However I’m loathe to write this, since just after I made a similar comment about the lack of midges, they’ve exploded into the environment in huge numbers. For the very first time, I’ve even had to resort to wearing a lightweight silk balaclava in addition to our preferred ‘Skin so Soft’ liquid, to keep the pesky insects at bay when the wind has dropped.

This abundance of herbage is going to present real problems for us in making hay. Having to get it dry in daytime temperatures which are barely reaching mid-teens, and with often heavy dew from cool nights, and limited sunshine is nearly impossible. There are no hints on the long-term forecast of a sustained hot dry spell, so on June 5th, with a small potential window of a few consecutive fairly dry days, I took the plunge and cut some small sections in both meadows with the least number of flowers.

Typically, overnight 1 mm of un-forecast rain fell, and the next night a very heavy dew descended. Much of the following 3 days were grey, with temperatures mostly reaching 12, let alone 15, degrees C. The only saving grace was the quite brisk winds, from the North. We thought we were in sight of a dry enough crop to gather in, after the third night had sufficient cloud to keep temperatures above 11 degrees C: thus exceeding the dew point with our typically high 85% humidity. However yet another un-forecast shower around midday wet the crop once more. Eventually around 3.30pm, the sun broke through, 3 hours later than predicted in the morning.

A couple of rollings of the hand turned windrows meant that we could gather the hay into our big bags loose, and get it inside the hay sheds by 9 pm – which is when with clear skies and temperatures dropping to 6 degrees C, dew would once more descend. Tipped out and loose this hay will be lovely and high quality, but it’s required several more turning inside the sheds by Fiona over 3 days to get it down to a dry enough level to store without mould formation or overheating. What a palava. And all for a few quids’ worth of winter fodder for our sheep.

Such decisions are always a balance – we have to complete the harvest in short bursts, and at least if we clear sections now, both grass and flowers will recover for a very vigorous second flush later in the year. Left uncut for another few weeks, these areas with little in the way of hemi-parasites like yellow rattle and eyebright would become so rank and lush that they’d become very difficult to dry if we don’t get a proper hot period later on. I’m also reminded that we’ve just passed the date last year when the amazing 6 week hot, sunny, dry spell ended.

Since then, we’ve had a single warm dry spell of longer than a week – in mid-September. That’s in a whole year. Which means for the first time, we’re thinking about what we do, should we not be able to harvest even a third of these fields this year, or indeed in future years. Clearly, this isn’t a concern for commercial scale farmers, since most fodder is removed these days as silage and wrapped in plastic – this can be completed in a day or so, if the heavy machinery can make it onto fields which aren’t too wet. But as I look out across the landscape and see the (still) peppering of golden fields amongst the plain green, I think of where the significant bio-diversity lies, and am determined to try to keep these meadows as they are for as long as we’re able.

 

 

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Another bonus of what is essentially our regenerative approach to managing these few acres of hilly land was highlighted by a recent film I travelled to view with friends at Mwldan in Cardigan last week. “Six inches of Soil”.  This page explains the idea behind creating the film. I thought it a very creditable attempt to highlight a massive problem with conventional and largely industrial agriculture, food production and marketing in the UK. And indeed in most of the ‘developed’ world. The film also considers possible solutions, through the prism of following 3 novice farmers in their first year of trying to establish new farming enterprises based on regenerative principles.

I already had a fair idea of the concepts, but the two most powerful messages I was left with was firstly the massive amount of carbon that can be stored in soils on farms that are managed in a regenerative way. And secondly, the quantity of produce that can be produced from the land when it is worked more sympathetically often approaches conventional yields when a regenerative system has been in place for a few years. Yet with vastly higher biodiversity, and reduced negative impacts to the land and soil.

The other factor at play in the explosion of vegetative growth, (aside from the abnormal weather in recent months), which I’ve witnessed here this year, is probably also beyond our control: excessive nutrients on the land arriving through both atmospheric, or water borne pollution. (I’m excluding here the minimal impact from my regular, but low volume liquid nitrogen application via the watering can😊.)

Recently I watched an interesting launch Zoom presentation by co-authors Jeremy Biggs and Penny Williams from the Freshwater Habitats Trust, of a new book “Ponds, Pools and Puddles”. 

This video is now available to watch, below, and is an interesting exploration of how such small and very varied bodies of freshwater, defined by them as (sometimes temporary) and up to 2 hectares in area, include the richest and most diverse aquatic plant and invertebrate communities found in the UK. And that this is in large part because of the reduced impact of water pollution, compared to streams, rivers and lakes, where the run-off catchment areas are usually much larger.

The presentation also highlights how such small bodies are always subtly changing, in a process that can last thousands of years, as vegetation and silt gradually accumulate in the ponds and can then subtly alter the physical and chemical nature of the pond. The authors are huge fans of new man-made ponds of all sizes and discuss how quickly they can become valuable refuges for many species in a wider landscape that is so often polluted with agrochemicals – fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides.

It’s been interesting to observe just how much the two ponds we had dug out in our lower meadows many years ago have changed over all that time, now having little free open water, in spite of being quite deep in the middle. Yet they’re still a haven for much wildlife. Located at the lowest points of our land, and with neighbours on the hill above who now use zero agricultural chemicals, they are relatively uncontaminated by significant pollution. Unlike our small bordering stream, which in spite of being within just a few hundred yards of its source, still now gets horrendous algal blooms in it, completely covering the rock and gravel stream bed for much of the spring and summer. This is at least in part due to applications of slurry and muck onto fields on the other side of the valley’s catchment.

Just how widespread is such pollution? It certainly is now getting a lot more media coverage. Our elder son has many years experience of trying to mitigate this in his role as a civil engineer in the water industry. We’ve discussed it many times, and he’s highlighted that although there is now specific legislative regulation as to when and how farmers can apply slurry or muck to the land, it’s very poorly enforced. And to be fair to farmers in periods of prolonged heavy rain, and saturated ground, (as we’ve endured for most of the last 12 months), there are rarely dry windows in which the slurry can be spread onto fields. And certainly difficult to apply it far enough from any water course to avoid it rapidly being washed into the stream or river. Which then causes the algal blooms we observe, which are so detrimental to water oxygen levels and aquatic life. He explained that in theory farmers should increase their holding capacity for slurry or muck, to prevent applications being made in unsuitable conditions. In practice this is simply too expensive an option for them.

However, it’s not just run-off from land based pollution that’s an issue. In this extensive recent report, (snappily titled: “Trends in critical load and critical exceedances – 2022)  the impact of atmospheric pollution on our landscape is disturbing. Again, one clearly can’t escape such impact, even in a quite remote landscape. It seems that our area of North West Carmarthenshire is a hot zone for excess atmospheric nitrogen deposition, equating to over 14, and possibly over 28 KG nitrogen per hectare per year, above the level considered to be critical for significant ecosystem damage. In other words our local ecosystems are probably suffering significant adverse impacts from all this excess nitrogen, falling from the skies. It’s a very detailed, long report, but the maps on page 20 illustrate how much of the UK now suffers from this sort of air deposited pollution. If I assume a figure of 25 KG Nitrogen excess, and try to put this surplus weight of nitrogen into context, it would equate to 100 KG of a typical granular commercial inorganic fertiliser being applied to every hectare of this part of the world, once a year. Free, but unavoidable. That’s a heck of a weight of unpaid for, unwanted nitrogen, both boosting plant growth, and impacting negatively on ecosystems. Perhaps it’s not surprising that our plants are looking so large this year, with ample soil moisture, if not bright light.

For those interested in where all this excess nitrogen comes from, it’s mainly two sources – atmospheric ammonia, of which about 88% comes from agriculture: from the spreading and storage of slurry, manure and inorganic fertilisers. And secondly from nitrogen oxides, which mainly come from the burning of fossil fuels in transport, energy production and other industrial processes.

We’re delighted (and amazed) to see that our stream still has small trout or salmonids in it this spring despite all the algal sludge. But mainly concentrated in a few of the deeper pools. Perhaps they will even evolve to cope with higher nitrogen and phosphorus levels which are the key elements involved in this.

I can certainly foresee a time when, if winters stay mild, cutting and producing hay the way we do may become too impractical in our changing climate. My guess is that a further reduced stocking rate, and greater plant diversity in all of our fields, might allow for regular rotational grazing of all our fields, with just a late annual topping of meadows and some scarification in the autumn months to encourage wild flower seed germination. And hoping we get minimal days of snow cover when access to the grass would disappear, and hay or some alternative supplementary feeding would be needed..

All of this discussion highlights that wildflower meadows are the most wonderful, diverse, nature-supporting communities. Creating many times greater diversity than a modern intensively managed pasture with its frequent slurry or fertilise applications, and cut for silage several times a year.

However, ‘natural’ they are not. They’re completely dependent upon sensitive human interaction and management. They change constantly, from year to year, regardless of human input. Yet remove or modify this seasonal human and herbivore grazing activity, (as aftermath grazing) and plant, fungi and invertebrate populations will change surprisingly quickly.

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The Old Man with the Hats

“Who owns this land?”

Asked the sun as he peered above the horizon and saw that the clouds had at long last vanished. He could see above the hundred hills and valleys that stretched in front of him, all the way to the distant sea in the West, beneath a sky of perfect blue.

He’d seen so much of our solar system. He’d seen so much of this Earth so many times. Mountain peaks, and arid plains. Open oceans and frosty forests, but never before seen such a green and golden, rolling, hilly land.

He asked again, to anyone who would listen to him this early in the morning, with the land still soaked in dew.

“Who owns this land?“

The kite ignored him, gliding down into a dying ash tree, where he hid behind a few unfurling, pale green leaves. Then the kite turned and whistle-warbled at the sun in his shrill, three-toned voice. Once or twice. The sun didn’t know if this meant anything, and if it did, he didn’t understand what it was, so rose higher in the sky, and asked a swallow, skimming low over the gently dancing buttercups.

“Who owns this land?“

“I can’t stop to chatter“, said the swallow swooping this way and that, and quartering the field at high speed. “I’ve chafers and flies to catch for hungry chicks before lunch and afterwards, I’ll hunt the drones and queens above the castle hill below you. And anyway, I only come here every summer on holiday. I don’t live here. Try asking the moles. They live here all year, so they should know the answer to your question.”

So the sun rose higher and burned down upon the slope as strongly as he could. Eventually, the brown soil of a molehill shifted, grew darker and damper in the centre and two big pink clawed spades pushed through, followed by a tiny pink nose, then long white whiskers and a head of softest black velvet.

“Who owns this land?” the sun asked the mole, patiently, wondering at this strange-looking animal, and how sad it must be to live underground for all of its life, with no fresh air to breathe. The mole squinted into the sky. He didn’t know it was dangerous to look straight at the sun, but anyway, his eyelids were tightly shut around his pinhead eyes, so although he heard the sun’s question, all he felt was a faint orange-hued warmth, behind his closed lids.

“Not me“, squeaked the mole in his quiet, thin voice. “I just live here and mine the ground for worms. You could ask them, I suppose, or better still, the Waxcaps. They’re well connected with everything, and probably know the answer to your question.”

“Ah“, said the sun. “And where will I find them?“

“I pass them every day down here. But if you want to see them above ground, you’ll have to come back later, in the autumn, when their mushrooms pop up“.

“Thank you“, said the sun, kindly, “But I think I’ll try asking someone else today. I never know when I might see this land again.“

So he looked down into the meadow and called to the millions of flowers which filled the field and danced happily together in the gentle breeze.

“Who owns this land?” the sun asked them, hopefully.

“Not us,” they sang in perfect harmony, their colours chorusing in golds and whites and pinks and blues more beautiful than any flowers the sun had seen in the world’s grandest gardens. “Our time is brief, we must enjoy it while we can. If you return too often, we’ll all be gone, cut down in our prime, to make hay to feed the sheep over winter so please don’t linger. But you could ask them before you go. They might know the answer to your question“.

By now, he’d risen high above the small flock quietly grazing in the valley bottom, with their cheerful black and white faces, so he boomed down in his warm voice.

“Tell me, little lambs, do you know who owns this land?“

The sheep all scattered, startled by this sudden sound from above, but when they saw it was only the sun, whom they’d missed for so many days, they all smiled and bleated up in unison.

“You need to ask the Old Man with the Hats. He’s bound to know.“

“Thank you,” said the sun. “And where will I find him, since I don’t have long before I have to move on, and I can’t see anyone about from up here.”

“He sometimes walks around the high meadow, all on his own“. They bleated back.

The sun looked down into the high meadow and saw shadows and the dark tips of boots just inside the open doors of the green hut. Which sheltered beneath a lollipop tree at the top of the field. He asked the North wind for a small favour, since he couldn’t see inside and wondered whether the Old Man with the Hats was sitting in there.

The North wind and sun weren’t the best of friends, but sometimes bumped into each other, so tried to keep on good terms. So the North wind did as the sun had asked him, and moved through the grass stems, which grew tall between the golden flowers. As waves upon an ocean, they whispered the sun’s question for him.

“Who owns this land?“

The Old Man with the Hat saw the swaying waves of grass, and heard the whispered question, sitting quietly as he was, all on his own.

“Indeed, I live here, and many years ago I did buy this land from the farmer who lived here before us. But do I own it? Let me gather my thoughts, which is why I sometimes sit awhile up here.“

Then, remembering that there was work to do, he rose, closed the doors, and began to walk down the hill, still thinking to himself, following the mown path that led amongst the flowers and grasses.

“Ah. Now I can see you,” said the sun, “I must tell you that of all the lands I’ve seen in my travels, this is truly one of the most beautiful, so I’m sure someone must claim to own it.”

Glancing up a little, but with the wide rim of his straw hat shielding his eyes from the sun’s fierce gaze, the Old Man with the Hat spoke again.

“Having thought a little more about what you asked, I think that for all your ancient wisdom, you’re asking me the wrong question.” The Old Man with the Hat replied.

“Which I find it’s very easy to do. And it’s even harder trying to answer the wrong question than trying to answer the right one. Particularly questions beginning with why, or how? Even if you think about the question for a very long time. I always used to struggle with the why questions when our children asked me. There’s rarely a simple answer. You have to try to understand what they’re thinking of, which is never easy, since they have far more ideas than we do. And we adults have far more experience and knowledge than they do from which to fashion an answer. So it should be easier for us, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be.“

He paused for a few moments, thought some more, and then walked on.

“But I still enjoy asking myself the why and how questions, and trying to work out the answers. Even if it takes me a long time, and even if I sometimes never succeed. Perhaps I’m a little too inquisitive in my old age. I do like to try to understand things.“

He paused again, then walked on a little further down the narrow path slanting through the meadow.

“No one really owns this land, I’d say. Although it’s true that I live here and call it home. Although we didn’t used to call it so, before we moved here from the North. Or was that the East? It’s so long ago now, and my memory isn’t what it used to be. I’m just a caretaker, a steward of this land, I think. When I came here I was looking for the golden key that lies at the end of a rainbow, which I’d read about in an old story. I’ve seen many rainbows here over all those years and always looked for a golden key. But I’ve never found one.“ “I suspect I never shall, although that doesn’t mean there isn’t one somewhere. Wouldn’t you agree? And if I did find one, what would it be for? Instead, I’ve sown these beautiful gold, and white, and pink, and blue flowers to cheer me and unlock such rich pleasures when your warmth returns each summer. And maybe when I’m gone, someone else will come to love this land, and call it home. And share it with the sheep and the bees and the birds and the flowers, which share it with my wife and I so graciously.“

“But I’m talking too much, as I always do.” Said the Old Man with the Hat, who by now had reached the bottom of the slanting path, by the long white house. The sun regretted that he couldn’t stay longer to ask the Old Man with the Hat some other questions which didn’t begin with who. Like why just a few of the fields had so many flowers, but most of the fields around didn’t. And how the Old Man with the Hat looked after the fields and everything that shared the land with him.

But he had the rest of the world to visit, so he thanked the Old Man with the Hat, for his answers and smiled. 

The Old Man with the Hat turned and watched as the sun slowly moved Westwards over the hill, sad to see him leave, after so brief a time.

“Now that’s a rarity.” The sun said to himself as he drifted lower across the sky. “A beautiful land that no-one wants to say they own.” Soon he began to pass over the calm sea that lay at the edge of the ocean, and the Old Man with the Hat disappeared from his sight.

The next day the clouds began to return, just after dawn. The sun was nowhere to be seen, though the brightness on the small clouds’ sides showed that he was still there, high above the clouds, which drifted East towards the hills that marked the horizon. Later in the day, The Old Man with the Hat climbed up the hill once more. And sat in the hut, alone with his thoughts. And wondered if he really had talked with the sun the day before. And who really owned this land. And whether it really mattered, anyway.

Or whether it was all just a daydream. Or an illusion. 

High above, now fully hidden behind the clouds, the sun passed overhead once more. Over the green and golden rolling land he’d seen the day before. Except, of course, the sun knew that it wasn’t he that was moving over the land. It was the Earth that was spinning around. Precisely one full turn, every single day. Which made it seem to the Old Man with the Hat that it was the sun which had moved across the sky. Now that really was an illusion.

Like the Old Man with the Hat, the sun still had so many questions he found it hard to answer. Even after living for such an enormously long time. Like where all the stars and planets that filled the trillions of galaxies that sparkled in the cold darkness all around him, actually came from. And where the universe that spanned them all really ended. And what was beyond that. And when the stars and planets and galaxies all began to be. Just thinking these questions made him feel very tired.

And although he didn’t ask as many who questions any more, after his brief conversation with the Old Man with the Hats, just once in a while he still wondered who had made them all.

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16/06/2024:

 

 

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28/06/2024:

 

 

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18/07/2024:

 

At last! March has broken the weather run that stretches back an awfully long way, into 2023. We’ve enjoyed multiple dry days in a row, with just enough rain to keep the soil moist. And a fair bit of sunshine, even if overnight frosts have been frequent.

St. David’s Day, which fell on the Saturday of our second successful weekend of National Garden Scheme (NGS) garden opening for 2025 began with a wonderful dawn chorus, heralded by a song thrush singing very close to the house. With little wind and almost no traffic, I took a lot of video footage and made the long YouTube, below, focused around the clarity and purity of this bird song.

It was almost as if the birds, like us, had been waiting for such a moment for so long, and now that it had arrived, they were going to sing their hearts out. I debated how to edit some very long scenes with such special song and no detracting external noise. Even the transatlantic jets, which often curtail such recordings, kept away. I know that few will bother to listen to the end of this 10 minute piece, but for me, this is immensely relaxing, and one doesn’t even need the visual stimulus to change. Which is why some of the very slowly zooming shots have been intentionally included. Locating the actual song thrush doing the singing is usually quite tricky. In the end I managed a few distant views, as it faced the sunrise.

Thanks to our friend Paula, a fellow NGS garden owner, and our lovely NGS county social media organiser for alerting me to the ‘Merlin’ bird song identification app. She used hers to come up with the following list of birds which the app identified from the video: blackbird, song thrush, house sparrow, robin, redwing, great tit, wren, nuthatch, goldfinch, pied wagtail and a mistle thrush, plus a very faint tawny owl and woodpecker.

Fiona now has added ‘Merlin’ to her Smartphone, since it’s so much better than her previous app in quickly bringing up a possible ID and image of the bird, as the song is detected from its on-device data base. It also reminded me that for all my resistance to owning a Smartphone, these devices do have some benefits!

 

Such a dramatic start to the month, along with my niece spotting an active lizard rustling through vegetation on the preceding, last day, of February, got me having a go at another acrostic poem for this month. Perhaps I’ll try this for every month of the year.

March Morn

 

March morn, frost’s scorn, sprung spring, clipped wings

Arcing sun, lizards run, torpor shed, hunger led

Rushed thrush, dawn’s thrum, dusk’s drum, heart’s thrill

Crocus clasped, crystal grasped, melting power, purple shower

Happy bees, flowers seized, nectar sipped, pollen shipped.

I rattled off another video, below, to try to capture the stage the garden had reached by the following week and just before another small group of visitors from a local U3A group in Llanelli had booked in to visit the garden. Something of a change in style for me with this one, but it followed a suggestion from Paula that she’d really like something no more than 90 seconds – which I already knew is the maximum for most people’s on-line concentration span these days. It had to to be an exercise in speedy filming and speedy editing, and something I’ll try to repeat, (about 4 hours in total!) to paint a picture of how quickly the garden changes at this time of the year.

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I can now confirm that the visit by a TV crew has just been transmitted by ITV as part of the latest, episode 2 of series 13 of their ‘Coast and Country’ show. Which is available to watch on this link. The section on Gelli Uchaf runs from about 17.00 minutes, should anyone be interested. We salute Kelsey, Hannah and James’ up-beat efficiency, focus, patience and enthusiasm on the day. This would have been followed by a lot of behind-the-scenes work by their team in editing all the footage they took during their time with us into their coherent filmed story. Adding in music, dubbing and general tweaking. We think it’s a wonderful take on both the journey we’ve been on for over 30 years, as well as the inspiration that living here brings not just to us, but many of our lovely visitors.

What I didn’t mention, when I touched on their visit in a previous post was that what I most dreaded was whether they’d use the footage they’d taken of me playing the piano. The researchers had clearly done their homework from our webpage about who we both are, and our interests. But what they didn’t know is that for all sorts of reasons my piano playing had dribbled away to nothing for much of last year, only tentatively reviving after we’d begun to have our A.G.O.G. meetings, when Mark and Phil’s guitar playing made me think I should start playing again.

Since none of my compositions are written down anywhere, such a long gap without touching the keyboard presented major problems: with me trying to remember them! But I was gradually rediscovering some by trial and error. Even so, it was very weird that something made me play for about 5 minutes on the morning of their visit before they arrived – for the first time in several days. So that when Kelsey said “Right, Julian, now we’d like to record you playing the piano”, I didn’t take the easy route out and decline, which would have been wiser, perhaps. I can confirm that some very skilful sound editing and photography have produced something which isn’t a complete auditory disaster, and does indeed record that this actually happened.

For any serious pianists (like James, the marvellous cameraman and hugely talented composer/pianist, ex Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama) who might listen to the recording of me, hunched up, in mitigation do bear in mind that I only began playing after I’d retired, as a new challenge. The snippet they recorded was the first thing that came into my head after Hannah encouraged me to play with the camera filming – my own take on what will be probably be a familiar track to many. The Lighthouse Family’s medley cover of the 1960’s song Free – (I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be) Free/One. I discovered this excellent video in following up on the song’s history:

Written as a jazz work, without lyrics, as simply “I wish I knew”, by the American Billy Taylor, it was first recorded by him in November 1963. With lyrics later added by Dick Dallas, it became a popular anthem for the American civil Rights movement in the 1960’s and was popularised by the version from 1967, sung here by Nina Simone 

The Lighthouse Family version, above, spliced Taylor’s song onto a chorus plucked from the U2 song “One”. It was released in November 2001, from their third studio album. “Whatever gets you through the day”. I’ve just ordered this recent compilation,  Essential Lighthouse Family Box Set of 3 CD’s which seems to be a bargain.

The lyrics always struck a chord with me, and the tune was simple enough for me to be able to work at, and play around with in my basic piano playing style. What only occurred to me after watching their YouTube a few times was how clever and appropriate the group’s video was for the lyrics. And then, a bit later, how of its time this video is.

All those people on a subway train. Lost in their own head spaces. Isolated lives, and hidden thoughts. No communication between them. (Mainly) no engagement with fellow travellers. Their lives above ground hidden from view, and temporarily of another world. All wishing to be free. From something.

 I wish I could be like a bird in the sky.
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly.
Well I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea,
Then I’d sing ‘cos I know
How it feels to be free.

In fact how every subway/metro train always used to be, on the few occasions we jumped on them in Paris, or (more rarely) London.

And then along came mobile devices. And all that downtime/thinking time? Simply vanished. To be replaced by feverish, eyes down scrolling and texting, or headphone music. Mmmm. Progress, eh?

And the last point about the group that intrigued me was their name: click on this article to discover the ‘chance’ events that drew the duo together, and how their name was settled upon. 

From 15/04/2024:

Before lambing started, I had several sessions collecting dry Purple Moor Grass, Molinia caerulea, from the uncut wet area of our lower hay meadow. I’ve mentioned this before since we use it as bedding for our sheep lambing pens. But this year’s prolonged dry spells in March and April meant I could take more off than usual as the layers of bleached foliage close to the ground progressively dried out once the material above had been removed.

It was while I was raking off/up the last few bags in my final session in late March, that I found a couple of intricately constructed nests. Spot the nest I saw first, centre image.

See it now?

One more mossy and unattached, the other apparently made exclusively of the pale fawn Molinia leaves and in places looking as though it was attached to leaves of the Molinia clump quite close to the ground. I couldn’t find an obvious entry hole in either case, although I could only see about a half of the exterior of the Molinia nest.

I’ve never seen or found a nest like this before, so needed to do a little online research, as to what had made them. This suggested that they were certainly mammalian constructs, not bird-made. But the question is, which mammal?

There seem to be 3 options: An overwintering nest, sometimes communal, made by bank voles, Myodes glareolus, which we know we have on our land.

The bank vole is the smallest of the UK’s voles (field and water being the others) and lives in woodland, hedgerows, and gardens. It has a diverse diet eating fruit, nuts and small insects, but is particularly keen on hazelnuts and blackberries. Of which there are many in the nearby tall laid hedge. They live in shallow burrows, but may also make grassy, round nests above ground, and sometimes over winter will share these with other voles, probably to aid heat retention. They have three or four litters a year, each with three to five young and don’t hibernate.

Or the much less common Hazel dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius.

This is a small mammal with a body of only 6–9cm with a feathery tail of similar length.  They weigh no more than 40g and are at their heaviest just before hibernation. They usually have just one litter a year, and eat a mainly vegetarian diet of nuts, seeds and berries, though will take items like caterpillars when available. They are the only species of British rodent to hibernate, often for many months, after first weaving a nest of leaves, about tennis ball sized, usually at ground level in holes in trees or in tussocky vegetation just above the ground.

Dormice prefer as habitat the new growth of woody vegetation that arises after woodland management such as coppicing, ride widening, thinning or glade creation. In the UK, they tend to favour old coppice woodland but they’re also found in scrubland, old hedgerows and sometimes conifer plantations. They’re now confined predominantly to southern England and Wales, in a patchy distribution.

Or finally the Harvest mouse, Micromys minutus:

Harvest mice are the smallest rodents in Europe. Their body length is only about 5-8 cms, plus a 5 cm long tail. They live in tall grass, brushwood, undergrowth, grain and reed fields. They are good climbers, avoiding the ground as much as possible. Nests are made by splitting live blades of grass and rubbing them into a kind of ball. Harvest mice are mostly active at night. They eat seeds, berries, fruit and shoots of grass, as well as mushrooms, moss, plant roots and insects.

From the attached maps from the NBN Wales atlas for these different species, you can see that only the Hazel Dormouse has ever been recorded before in this part of Wales. BUT the Harvest Mouse is known to use Molinia tussocks as protection for their nest building sites.

There’s a useful guide to nest identification in this PDF, with example photographs of nests, produced by the mammal society. Unfortunately the nests I found don’t tick all the right descriptive boxes for any of the 3 species, although after discovering it was safe to remove them at this time of the year since they’ll be unoccupied now, I did find a small entrance hole on the larger Molinia formed nest.

Thanks to a contact made through the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group, I’ve been in touch with a fairly local conservation officer, who says he’s happy to come and complete a survey of the field in the autumn to try to determine what species they might be. It would be a thrill if they were of one of the rarer species, but in any event it’s yet another example of the wonderful survival strategies that our local wildlife uses to carve out their own lives, unseen, while sharing this land with us.

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We had a phone call yesterday morning from Kath, the director of the film made at Gelli on the last day of March, letting us know that it’s definitely due for transmission on Episode 6 of BBC2 Gardener’s World this Good Friday (although as yet there seems to be no mention of it on their PR). It seems the series producers decided that the combination of gorgeous young lambs, lovely daffodils and a scruffy yokel was ideal for an Easter programme.

The final job for me was to complete a series of short ‘read’ transcripts of text I’d been sent by email from Kath to provide linking speech to scenes where Kath hadn’t quite managed to coax me into saying the right words on camera to make the storyline flow properly. What a fiendishly difficult job she has to complete – in very little time – a complete mini-feature film/documentary.

Thanks to Fiona knowing how to both record and send away these clips, they were apparently edited in to the final film yesterday, just-in-time. Anyone watching the show will have the challenge of working out which short pieces of text these are – I found it surprisingly hard as a non-actor to speak into a phone normally, as one would with ordinary speech, when one’s actually reading lines off a page in front of you.

However, I did have confidence that such phone recorded words could be made to blend in seamlessly, after remembering the story of Chrissie Hynde’s excellent lockdown album, made with guitarist James Walbourne, of Bob Dylan cover songs. (Rather appropriately titled – as you’ll see later “Standing in the Doorway”.)

She was remote to the guitarist and simply sang the lyrics into her iPhone, Walbourne recorded the guitars elsewhere and they were stitched together by a producer in mid-Wales – where a whole series of accompanying videos were made. The track I’ve chosen, below, is a good example of their style, and as with the album title, seemed weirdly appropriate for what follows shortly. I even love the selected screen capture still image!

Doesn’t the video seem very ‘of its time’ too?

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It was a delight to welcome our younger son, his wife and their 6 children last week for 3 nights. For maybe the first time at Gelli at this time of the year, they all enjoyed days of cloudless blue skies, and a dry landscape. Wonderful both for outside games, and in the case of three of the younger girls, a desire to be present and interact with the ewes and lambs at their twice daily feeding sessions. The sheep were very well behaved, and I think all the kids were able to tickle somebody’s chin, a huge complement to our benign flock. (Thanks to Fiona for this image).

The weather also meant perfect conditions for Fiona to set out her annual mini Easter egg and bunny hunt.