Where the meadow was overun with Queen Annes Lace we had to take action to manage the spread of the plant in the coming years. When the flower goes to seed, it produces thousands of small brown seeds per flower head. We spoke to the seed mechant, Emorsgate Seed, about this and they reccomended taking the seed heads off the stalks and taking them away. Difficult when you have about 20,000 plants! In comes the new Storm Wildlife munching machine! Its actually called a flail collector and cuts using flails attached to a rotating drum and collects the arisings in the huge box behind. We found that if you lift the machine on the 3 point linkage of the tractor to the height of the lowest Queene Annes Lace flower head, it makes a good job of whipping them all off and securing them in the sealed box at the back. We took the arisings away and are using them to create compost. You will never get them all, but we have done our best to manage them.
by Mike Hopkins
14Jul2025
Too much of a good thing!
Queen Annes Lace has appeared in abundance and is a great plant for insects like bees as its tiny flowers are a rich source of nectar. Birds eat the seeds and mammals use the big umbrella like canopy to hide under. However, it is so abundant that if it is allowed to seed and is part of the hay cut, we could have even more next year and the year after. Our target is to create a species rich meadow and as you can see from the photo, there is one sole purple flower (common knapweed) amongst the backdrop of Queen Annes Lace.
by Mike Hopkins
2Jul2025
Enter the Scythe
The Old English scythe arrived as a Christmas present from my mother-in-law, it had been restored by one of my mother-in-laws farmer friends who had kept it in his barn for many years. I got the scything course from my children for Christmas and this was held in June by a great little company called Hedgecraft. On the course (despite it being for Austrian scythes) I learned how to adjust the scythe for me, cut different types of grasses/undergrowth and how to sharpen the blade. Since learning how to do it properly, I have replaced the petrol strimmer with the scythe for some of the jobs like mowing round the apple trees, it is a lot more satisfying somehow!
We did our annual species count in the meadow using the same What3Words addresses for the nine quadrats. The highest number of species found in one quadrat was nineteen (ten in 2024), with two other quadrats returning seventeen each. The lowest count of species in a quadrat was five, which is in an area yet to be seeded. An abundance of crested dogs tail grass in the upstream end of the meadow was found which was in the seed mix that was sown in the autumn of 2023, it is beginning to look like the original sowing might come good after all! A marvellous show of Oxeye Daisies, Queen Annes Lace and Common Knapweed coming through for the first time, again all in the seed sown in Autumn 2023. Things are looking up!
