Making our Meadow Blog

Gill fungus in dry meadow

Leptoglossum muscigenum found growing on moss in dry meadow:

Why do I bother to weed asparagus!

 
Asparagus season has started at last and this year I have persuaded the wife to forgo the dubious pleasures of witte asperges since my knackered back won't let me do all the extra work involved.

Meadowcam up and running

After a couple of weeks of fiddling about and testing I have finally managed to take the camera and battery back to the field and resinstall it today. I have made the following changes:

• added a new, sturdier wooden prop made from a skewer to hold the on button in the correct position, plus a number of spares stored in the small tupperware box, plus some spare elastic bands. I think that the main problem was caused by the original prop made from a cocktail stick being too weak and gradually slipping, causing the camera to turn off.  
• added a printout of the programming instructions in the box. Not being able to reset the controller in the field was a problem! But it should not be a problem now.
• set up the interval at 20 mins, and the on time at 35 seconds, with no bracketing. This should prevent the problems caused by the memory card filling up.
• set up the camera to enable the images to be downloaded more easily.

When I was first setting up the camera (seversal years ago now!) I found that adding a USB cable would not enable the camera to take images. This is still the case, but having tested it throughly I now know that I can plug in the cable to download and delete the images on the card, without having to extract the camera and risk disturbing it. I have had to remove the rubber cover for the usb point.

The cable links up to the netbook (now a lot less undpredictable...) and I tested it twice today so I am confident it will work. I will try to check it more regularly just in case.
 

 

Meadowcam up and running again

After lots of fiddling about I have finally got the Meadowcam working again. I have reprogrammed the controller although I don't think that was the main problem. I think the main problem was that the small cocktail stick being used as a strut to keep the camera turned on was affecting the dial. I have used a beefed up version made from a wooden skewer. Tests using a clock have been successful so far. I will continue to run it for a few more days. Before I take it back to install on the meadow I will make a set of replacement sticks to the same spec as the new one. I will also refrain from using the play function of the camera. I will use the Netbook to check images and avoid moving the strut at all.

Meadowcam update

I went to restart the Meadowcam yesterday, assisted by wife, child and steen. Unfortunately while I got it working it would not turn off again so would only take a single shot. I seem to recall this happening before but did not have my notes so could not reset it. Brought it back home for tinkering and picked a load of sloes.

Meadowcam update

Went to Bury Field to check up on the meadow cam today. It had run out of memory ( 4Gb!) in May. Clearly 10 minutes is too close an interval, or at least demands closer monitoring. I was going to try to reprogram it when I lost the wooden pin holding the shutter button open...again! so I will need to go back.

However I did see a small copper, a common blue and a brown argus. And the sloes were enormous already, so we picked a hatful, as well as gorging ourselves on blackberries.

From meadow to saltmarsh?

My brother Phil retuned empty handed from another fishing expedition on Sunday, so no fish supper. But he did bring back a bag full of Marsh Samphire (Salicornia europeaus) which I have always wanted to try but never quite got round to. Unfortunately they had not been trimmed and I still haven't tried them yet, but since quite a few still had their roots attached (I assume he was in a bit of a hurry...) I thought I would see if they coudl be grown in pots. I have tried some in square 9cm pots filled with gritty loam and some in larger pots filled with hydroleca clay pellets:

 
I gather that they need to  be watered regularly with salty water (30g per litre), hence the jug. They are in the greenhouse at present, I will see how they do. The plant is an annual, so I will only be able to keep it going for a bit - but I might be able to save some seed and re sow in the spring.

Meadow management - late summer 2011

Last week I purchased some Yellow Rattle seeds from an excellent Suffolk based nursery called Wildflower Shop, along with some Meadow Clary plug plants. Yellow Rattle is a beautiful plant which is a hemiparasite of grasses and can reduce their vigour to help herbs to flourish in a meadow. I cut the remaining sward to a height of about 40mm, which was surprisingly easy even with a simple hand powered push mower to finish off the rough scythe cut I had already done. I considered using a petrol driven mower, but besides the fact that I hate them, I didn't want all the seeds and invertebrate eggs / larvae to get sucked up in into the mower. Afterwards I raked up the moss which grows prolifically (especially on the dry meadow) and the dry thatch in the damp(er) meadow. I then sowed about half the Yellow Rattle seed, principally in the damp meadow area and around the Damson tree. I will sow some more seed this week and then the following week, each time giving it a bit of a rake and firming it in by foot.

I got a huge mound of moss from the meadow:

 
   I am soaking this in a bucket of water to use as bedding for my worm farm. Makes me wonder whether I could make a peatbog however... hmmm...

Latest Worm Farm

While the small box type worm farms i had made were quite successful, I found it all a bit fiddly, so i converted an out door cabinet I had (mainly full of old pots and other junk). I didn't bother adding drainage holes, since it wasn't perfectly sealed, or airholes, due to the size. I just dumped a load of composted vegetable matter in and let them get on with it.

6 months later I have about a cubic meter of very moist worm castings and a population of worms with a very wide age structure, suggesting to me that they are breeding successfully. I emptied the other bins in and have now just started using my mega bin:

 
Inside the bin I have laid cardboard and plastic to retain the moisture:

 
Under the plastic are many worms:

 

Orchid flowering!

Well, after 6 years of bashing my head against a brick wall I have finally got a wild orchid to flower in the garden:
 
Common Spotted Orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii

 

 Close up of Common Spotted Orchid

And the truth will out: I grew it in a pot - all the other ones perished!