Making our Meadow Blog

New species spotted in wet meadow

I saw a male Small Skipper butterfly in/near the wet meadow yesterday, buzzing from sunny patches where it was basking to the still flowering patch of Birds foot trefoil where it was feeding. Since this is a species which is supposed to be quite restricted to hisorical sites (I think) while not being particulaly rare, it was quite a surprise to see one. I will keep my eyes open for a female, and will leave some patches of longer grass for them to breed in. Picture in the Animals Photo Album

June flowers

As June rolled on, the meadow continued to develop with a few surprises in store. After my neighbour's attempt to smother part of the sward with good intentions, I attempted to film the regrowth using a Canon Powershot S1 with a built in intervalometer. I made a polycarbonate box for it with a cheap tripod fixed to the bottom. For a change this didn't leak (see Pond Cam section for details of other failed photographic experiments) but instead the second hand camera sourced on EBay for about £50.00 just stopped working properly. It seems to have started again now so i might give it another bash later on. This is probably a really bad idea but following an innocent query to my techie mate Steen, we are going to try to record the development of the meadow over time using a sort of cable car mounted over the top of the meadow. I'm not sure it will work, in fact given the litany of disasters that have befallen all the other attempts at filming the meadow / pond so far it will almost certainly won't. But wait till you see the camera mounting mechanism devised by Steen on one of the many wet Sundays recently. It is a work of art... The meadow itself is looking excellent. The grasses are all flowering profusely (see previous post...) and the clover has pretty much all done its thing by now as has the Greater Birds Foot Trefoil in the wet meadow - although interestingly the plants nearer the pond are not only still blooming but are spreading into the pond. The ox eye daisies are now starting to to go over. The scattered buttercups, bulbous and meadow, are continuing to flower and the yellow rattle flowers have been popping up throughout the wet and dry meadows. The next most visually impressive plant is the Perforate St John's Wort which is now just starting to bloom on the dry meadow. The Common Knapweed had been flowering throughout June and is only now starting to set seed. Finally the Devil's Bit Scabious plants which I added last year have also just started to flower and are looking to be very impressive. But the real star turn has been two plants which I don't even remember buying. I don't know if they were a mix up or if my memory is on the blink but two enormous specimens of Viper's Bugloss have appeared. I thought they were scabious plants which shows how poor my botanical identification skills have become recently... Anyway it is such an impressive plant, throwing generous spikes of glorious sky blue flowers. If you haven't done so already have a look in the Plants 2008 section. Another recent event was the purchase of a sickle (along with some other tools) from the excellent Get Digging website, which I have added to my list of links but who can also be found here: http://www.get-digging.co.uk/ It really has worked a treat and I'm afraid that it resulted in a few random 'bald' patches. Or habitat diversification as those in the know call it.

Flaming Bloody June

I used to hate June. Ever since I was a small child with a burgeoning interest in natural history I have wanted to crawl around in the undergrowth, looking at all the wildflowers which are at their very best in June, delighting at the beetles and butterflies and marvelling at the ants, solitary wasps, spiders, snails and other invertebrates busily munching away through the meadows and each other. But every June I would be plagued by hayfever, turning into a useless wet blob, sneezing to exhaustion, blinded by tears, wheezing to the point where i could hardly stand up. It seemed a bit unfair back then. Now of course i have learned that all the drugs are just rubbish peddled by greedy pharmaceutical companies which simply do not work, and that this is the price of being outdoors. It still strikes me as being a bit unfair, why can't I be allergic to something I don't enjoy, like cats or football? But compared with all the death and destruction and doom going around it is a pretty paltry type of unfairness.

So, you may well ask why I am making a meadow, full of grasses to spread pollen to get up my nose? Well apart from the fact that there would still be plenty of pollen around, and the fact that the other 11 months are trouble free, I think I might use it as a pollen reserve and go out sniffing it every morning from april onwards and try to build up an immunity. Or maybe I just forgot that i get hayfever. Oh yeah that was it, I designed it in winter!

Bugger, i won't do that again!