30 Days Wild 2019 – Day 02

Not every Sunday, but on most, I do my best to take part in #Wildflowerhour on Twitter.  Wild Flower Hour is a wonderful community of people that are interested in the wild flowers which are in bloom in the UK at the present time.  I have been taking part for about 9 months now and I have learnt so much from everyone that takes part.  If you are interested in our wild flowers please do give them a follow, even if you don’t post any images of your finds to start with you can learn so much by looking at everyone else’s photos.  As I slowly began to get more confident in my identification I also gained confidence to post more images.  Even if you don’t know the name of a flower you have photographed someone will be there to help ID it for you, especially if you include #WildflowerID to your tweet.  I know as more of the yellow flowers come into bloom I will be asking for help as I find some of them so confusing; the difference between Common Ragwort and Hoary Ragwort, nope I still haven’t got my head around that one yet!  

Today on my walk I found…

Fox-and-cubs

Yarrow

Green Alkanet

Hedgerow Crane’s-bill

Black medick

Herb-Robert

Dog rose

Common Bird’s-foot-trefoil

Cleavers

Wood Avens

White Dead-nettle

Bush vetch

Red clover

Common vetch

Dandelion

Oxeye daisy

Rewilding the field!

Okay so the title of this blog is probably a tiny bit misleading… well… at the moment anyway!  As you know I spend a lot of time inspecting what is in the field and the garden next to the field.  I love the view through the garden gate into the ‘secret garden’ of the field beyond.  

As my knowledge has increased I have noticed this year how ecologically barren the field really is.  Yes the field margins look lush and green, but if you look closely there is very little diversity in the plant life.  So I have taken it upon myself to ‘rewild’ it a little.

Now the farmer that rents the field sprays it with what we assume are insecticides and herbicides, from what we can tell he uses direct spraying so hopefully it won’t destroy all of what I am trying to create.  I should add that the owner of the field has given me permission to work on a patch of the field to see how it goes.  The patch I have decided to use is just outside the garden fence.  There are a few of reasons for this A) easy access B) the farmer can’t cut it down before they harvest the crop as the combine can’t cut that close to the corner! and C) it is full of common nettles and cleavers. 

To start work I had to clear a path through the nettles and cleavers to be able to actually get out into the field.

I then began to clear the cleavers doing my best to leave as many nettles and cow parsley as I could; I did discover that although I thought there were lots of nettles, there wasn’t, it really was all cleavers.

Pulling the cleavers up revealed no life underneath them at all, it was just soil.  I did feel bad pulling up the greenery as it looked horrendous leaving bare soil; however I know, if all goes to plan, the results will be better for our pollinators than leaving it as it is. 

A few weeks ago I moved a prickly sow-thistle from the garden and put it out in the field.  I was pleased to see it survived its move and was even in flower, I was more pleased when a bee came along and had a look at it.  It dawned on me that the only obvious flowers in the field were the cow parsley.  I am hoping that as summer progresses I will see more of a variety appear but I don’t hold out a lot of hope. 

I thought I was going to clear a ‘good patch’ of field margin but when it came to it I cleared a little patch!  Partly this decision was down to the fact that everything I was pulling up had to fit in the garden waste bin!  It was already partly full and what I had removed would have filled it three fold!

However the little patch was enough for me to make a start, I planted out some teasels and cornflowers to see how they fared.  I decided five of each would do, as if they didn’t take to their new home I didn’t want to kill lots in one go! 

When I checked on them the next day they looked quite happy 🙂  I do plan on watching the field more closely this year to see what plants naturally occur, then maybe next year I can boost their numbers by growing more from seed!  I may need a bigger greenhouse!

In the next week or so I will be planting out more teasels, cornflowers, oxeye daisy, common fleabane and red campion and maybe even clearing some more space!     

30 Days Wild 2018 – Day 29

A few weeks ago I noticed the Oxeye daisy’s at work were in flower. They come up every year and their numbers are strong.


Today I went to see if they had gone over. Many of them had so I broke off two flower heads, thanked the plant and took them home. I plan to distribute the seeds in the garden next to my Patch (I have permission to do this) and also some along the road verge. They have recently cut the grasses that were happily growing, so I thought if a few flowers come up next year it would add to the variety of vegetation. If you don’t count the cow parsley there are actually no flowers growing in the verge at all, I’d like to slowly change this to try and help our pollinators 🙂