Bog Myrtle & Peat

The turnips are frosted, but that’s not to say they’re finished. A third of the field has now been lifted and fed to the cattle, and the remnants are standing proud in the ice and driving rain.

In trying to measure the conservation benefits of having grown turnips in 2019, I find it’s hard to place a value on them. They drove an incredible boom in wildlife between June and October, but his has really tailed off over the last few weeks. I believe that the turnips are almost single-handedly responsible for bringing hares into this part of the farm, but the crop’s value to birds seems to have slumped as the shaws melted and the frost set in. The turnips have managed to hold onto the hares (see pic above), but there are only a few small birds roosting in the crop each night, and it’s nothing compared to the busy days of early autumn.

Balance that against the oat crop of 2018. The oats did very little for wildlife until they matured. Birds began to hang in the seedheads only when the crop went black and was ready to be cut. Once the reaper had been through, there was a wholesale bonanza of wildlife excitement – the stubbles really went up a gear in October, then stood at a fever pitch until the spring.

So there’s a chronological mismatch between oats and turnips which makes it hard to draw a meaningful comparison between the two. It’s unlikely that one is “better” for wildlife than the other, and more probable that they offer different strokes for different folks. The oats were astonishingly good for yellowhammers, linnets and winter partridges – the turnips have been better for hares, insects and broods of wild pheasants.

The reality is (yet again) that the best results for wildlife would probably come from a patchwork of oat and turnip crops managed in unison. Wildlife would be free to drift between the fields according to what was on offer, and the whole glen would be buoyed by diversity.

As a footnote, perhaps I’m unusual for leaning so heavily upon the upsurge of hares. They’re a fact of life in many places, and I know many people for whom a boost in hare numbers would be a matter of moderate indifference. But I didn’t grow up with hares – we never had them on my family’s farm, and I always considered them to be objects of extreme value and curiosity. I still love hares, but I sing their praises in this context because they often seem to represent the health of a habitat. If you’ve got hares, you’re doing something right.