Bog Myrtle & Peat

It has now been three and a half months since I sowed my “wild” oats, and I can now happily report that tremendous progress has been made. At the time, the oat project was designed to work out if arable crops can be grown on freshly drained peat, but as the summer has gone on, I have learned a tremendous amount about sowing game crops and providing wildlife with a source of food over  the winter.

My first mistake was in the manner in which I physically sowed  the oats by hand. The soil was too wet to create a tilth, so the seeds landed willy-nilly on the peat. It was only with a tremendous amount of stamping and scratching at the ground that I was able to cover a moderate percentage of the oats, and anticipating that they would simply be pecked away by chaffinches as per my first experiment with cereal crops, I was left with no other option than to simply hope for the best.

Against all odds, nothing ate the oats. Even the most vulnerable seeds sprouted roots and shoots, while the local population of pheasants, pigeons and dickie birds seemed wholly uninterested in the experiment. In retrospect, it would have been good if they had taken some of the seeds, because the plants grew far too close to one another and there was a long period throughout late June when the growing process seemed to stop altogether. The crowded oat plants reached around eight inches in height, then refused to budge any further. It was only after a large percentage had died away that the remainder could be coaxed skywards, and in the last few days, decent oats have appeared.

It may be on such a small scale as to be fairly well useless for the black grouse to use the stubble much over the winter, but using the information learned from my test patches, I plan to sow much larger patches in the spring.