Putting horses on the meadow for aftermath grazing is always a challenge. Getting the electric fence installed and water infield is just the start! We tend to borrow horses from other places as there is too much grass for our two. They come on holiday to the meadow, they are a mixed bunch, all very smart; some naughtier than others, but they are on holiday, and sometimes get a bit over excited! Daily checks on the fencing are needed and at times repairs are made - sometimes I wonder what goes on in there at night! But everyone goes back a little bit fatter and with different experiences under their belts, a bit like a human holiday in reality!

With an earlier hay cut it has presented us with an opportunity to get the last areas seeded before the floods come. Although we have had early autumn floods before, there is never a right time to sow seed in this meadow, so we are just going for it. We have proof that target species are appearing from sowings that were followed by floods (within two weeks), which has given us more confidence that sowing seed now will have some rate of success. All the seed has arrived from Emorsgate Seeds, an amazing company that produce high quality grass and wildflower seeds for exactly our kind of project - all seed is produced in Cambridgeshire or is harvested from very old established meadows. Now I need to plan some time off from my day job to get the seed sown.

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.

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!

Knowing what we know so far, we have taken the plunge and bought a machine that will hopefully prepare our ground better and provide more options for grazing/cutting. We bought an ex-hire flail collector which is often used in parks and golf courses to cut large areas of grass, collect the cuttings in a big collector box and then tip the cuttings into a trailer to take away. It also has scarifying blades which hang beneath the flails and if the mower height is set low enough will scarify the ground, ripping out the rye grass to leave a good amount of bare soil for newly sown seed to make contact with. We used this to sow another 3 acres with Emorsgate 2 seed this month.

We made a sale of biodiversity units last week to enable a developer to start the constuction of a retirement home in the local area. The time taken from the agreement to proceed to the completion of the transaction was exactly one month. This timescale was achieved through efficient communication from all parties.

The funds received will go towards the improvement of the species rich grassland and traditional orchards and the ongoing maintenance.

It has been 3.5 years since we purchased the meadow and started on our journey to be a #BNG offset provider - it has been no easy task, but we can now start to see the full cycle of the system working, from management plans to legal agreements to sales and unique transaction codes.

Now the environment will really start to benefit.

Random photo - but I liked it!