The time is ripe for going wild in your garden
MY challenge to wildlife lovers to share their stories always bears fruit, take this from Dusty Baggins of Hadfield, who tells me that he has been instrumental in the creation of a wildflower meadow on council land in Hadfield.
Dusty, proper up-early countryman and no relation to Frodo and his clan, although he did set out on a journey into the unknown with his mission, said: “It all started with a flippant remark as my train pulled into Hadfield Station from Piccadilly, ‘I would love to turn that bottom field into a wildflower meadow’.”
People said, ‘Well do it!’ So he did, founding ‘Bee Wild Glossopdale’, and with the help of two friends, Lisa and Adele, he cracked on letter-writing, talking to the council, fundraising and researching.
Dusty’s perseverance paid off because the council provided a man and tractor to turn over the field and with a band of 20 willing volunteers raking and seeding the soil, the job was soon done.
If you want more birds in your garden next spring, then get the nest boxes built and sited now and if you long to enjoy the once common meadows filled with myriad flower species and of course the attendant butterflies and bees, then get on with it now.
Our countryside was once full of meadows bursting with a gorgeous variety of flowering plants, supporting butterflies, insects, farmland birds and other wildlife. But, since the 1930s, we have lost over 99 per cent of what are called ‘unimproved grasslands’.
Autumn is the best month for sowing your seeds. You might want to turn some of your lawn or an old flower border into your new wildflower meadow or better still be like Dusty. It needs to somewhere open and sunny, but can be flat or sloping. A relatively large area is best, where you have space for growing a range of wildflowers. This may seem counterintuitive but, your soil is likely to be too rich for a meadow if it’s had plenty of fertiliser added over the years. The best way to reduce the fertility is to remove the top three to six inches of topsoil, using a turf cutter, or a spade and muscle-power. If you don’t want to strip the soil, you can reduce some of the fertility by sowing a crop of mustard plants in the first year as they are notoriously hungry plants and will remove some of the nutrients from the soil as they grow.
Time for more backbreaking effort. You need to create a fine tilth (soil which looks like breadcrumbs) for seed sowing, as you would with a lawn.
Once you have bare soil, lay black plastic over it so that any weed seeds already in the soil germinate and die.
Flowers suggested by my good friends at the RSPB include:
Birds-foot trefoil (important for common blue butterfly caterpillars)
Common sorrel (important for small copper butterfly caterpillars)
Cowslip
Field scabious
Hoary plantain Greater and common knapweed
Lady’s bedstraw Meadow buttercup Ox-eye daisy
Red clover
Ribwort plantain
Wild carrot
Yarrow... plus a range of wild grasses, such as bents, fescues and crested dogstail (not lawn grasses).
And the magic ingredient is yellow rattle, an annual flower that has a special ability to reduce the vigour of the grasses.
Read more at http:// www.rspb.org