Great day to be outside and a nice and relaxed workday. Marcus, Mick, Aaron and myself were certainly enjoying the sunshine.
It was important to get our wildflower beds watered and keep the bird-feeders topped up. Plenty to do. Aaron and Marcus did a great job of clipping back anything that was encroaching onto the path or around the benches.
We sourced the water from the stream that runs under the greenway and meanders towards Cawston Reservoir, which you can just see in the distance in the photo below.
In the autumn we are going to take back the bramble right to the edge of the path, both before and after the bridge. As our wildflowers flower and then go to seed, we are going rake the grass really hard to remove the thatch, and also get a golf club and create a load of divots. This is to give the seeds every change of getting down into the soil and germinating next year. The area is perfect for wildflowers because it is flat, on top of the embankment and in full sun.
Here is a little clip of our wildflower seedlings. I have three youtube subscribers already and am quite looking forwards to my BAFTA nomination next year.
We have a long long way to go, but if we do all the right things, this bed of wildflowers will spread and add to the already varied wildflower habitat that already exists.
The butterflies and bees will love this area and it will be fantastic to sit at one of the benches and just enjoy the scents and colours.
Butterflies seen today and recorded on iRecord: Brimstone, Speckled Wood, Peacock, Orange-tip, Small White, Large White and maybe a Green-veined White.
Thanks all,
Paul
We found a pretty sheltered area and started to scrape the top off the ground. Eventually we had a three meter by one meter area of bare earth.
We mixed all of our seeds together and then mixed them with a peat-free compost for easy distribution.
We will just need to repeat the above a few times and then see what grows in the summer. As the wildflowers flower and then go to seed, we will need to scrape back more of the grass so the seeds can get into the soil and spread next year. We can introduce yellow rattle in the autumn. This is a lovely wildflower that is great for bees and is also semi-parasitic to grass so should keep it in check and help us get a good balance of grass and flowers.
I added some field poppies, really just to commemorate the 1918 one hundred year anniversary. The seeds in the other packs are, bird’s foot trefoil, common knapweed, corncockle, crested dog’s-tail, hedge bedstraw, lady’s bedstraw, oxeye daisy, quaking grass, selfheal, yarrow, betony, corn chamomile, corn marigold, cowslip, foxglove, red campion, white clover, wild carrot, musk mallow, salad barnet, wild basil, wild marjoram, bladder campion, great mullein, campion, garlic mustard, nettle-leaved bellflower, St John’s wort, ragged robin and upright hedge-parsley.
It’s looking good.
An interesting fungus that I will try and ID later on..
Loads of bumble-bees and Brimstone butterflies seen today. Great to see the greenway coming back to life.
So thinking that our feeders were safe from the squirrels, after they easily managed to scramble up our smooth steel poles, I wandered off southwards to pick up any litter.
It looks like I am going to have to shell out even more money to secure our feeders!! Hopefully it will be third time lucky. Thankfully I have kept all the previously chewed up feeders so was able to make good feeders with all the bits.
Jelly Ear used to be called Jew’s Ear. People think that the name was changed because it was disrespectful to Jewish people, but actually the name is derived from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an elder tree, from which the fungus normally grows, and Judas’s Ear got shortened to Jew’s Ear. It is edible but not a great texture or taste. So there you go, a little bit of trivia for you, which is quite relevant at Easter time.
