It’s that time of the year again, probably a few weeks late, but everything that grew over the summer is spent, seeds dropped and needs to be cleared and stacked away from the area.

The reason why we need to rake up the cuttings and stack them in piles is two-fold. We don’t want all the goodness going back into the soil and feeding the grass and encouraging thuggish stuff like nettles and thistles. And we want to create habitat piles for all sorts of things to live in, and hopefully help the full cycle of life for all sorts of wildlife.

Here are before and after clips (speeded up so as not to bore you to tears) spliced together to make a single video clip. I put it to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Autumn masterpiece, which is quite apt.

Whilst this looks a bit over-the-top!! It is just clearing out this year’s growth so we get new wildflowers next year. To leave it means it just turns to scrubby bramble and it dominates the area very quickly and nothing else grows.

Here is the scrub raked into the centre and then stacked up.

That’s really about it for this week. Same again for the next few weeks working northbound, to create dry and bare ground to walk on and wildflowers to flourish next year. When we have cleared out this years growth, we can start to look at cutting back new bits, moving hawthorn and ash saplings into our hedge and do some work on the canopy to let sunlight in.

Patron us via the link above. If lots of people give us just £2 a month each, it means we can keep our tools sharp, the birds fed and buy decent wildflower seed mixes to make the path as interesting as possible. Plus it keeps us stocked up in biscuits and coffee, which everyone is welcome to join us at 11am on every workday and just get to know us and hopefully join in.

Until next week!

Paul