Bog Myrtle & Peat

More by accident than design, the late season silage which came off in November left my best field in a sorry state. It is only now beginning to show signs of life, and that late start hasn’t been helped by several weeks of absurdly dry weather. In planting a new hedge and replacing some old trees which came down over the winter, I took a look at the resurgent grass and found it has been over-run with dandelions.

I don’t know enough to venture an explanation for this abundance, but I like to think that any upsurge in “weeds” might be down to the fact that I withdrew slurry and bagged fertiliser in July 2018. My beautiful hayfield is now a six acre plot of golden flowers, and in a year where the word “unprecedented” has been bandied around far too often, I must admit that I’ve never seen the like.

During a hot, windless hour yesterday afternoon, I was staggered to find that the dandelions were absolutely humming with bumblebees, and the field was a-buzz. I’m late to the party on managing grasslands for pollinators, but I do know that bumblebees depend upon good nectar sources early in the season. Largely as a result of my own dodgy workmanship, a few marginal areas of the field were missed by the mower, and these have grown deep and tussocky over the winter – they should make good nesting sites if the bees choose to hang around. I notice that the bees were largely of the “red-arsed” variety – a common but hearteningly chunky beast with a buzz like a boy-racer.

Drawing an end to the application of fertiliser and slurry on this field was always going to lead to a drop in productivity. I’m lucky that I was able to produce more grass than I needed last winter, but with more cattle coming and diminishing returns from land that I had always “banked upon”, I leaped at the chance to take on a second hayfield for the summer. More on this to come, but needless to say that this is an expensive and slow way to run a farm. On the plus side, having moved away from a regime which depended upon extracting 100% from one field, I can now explore the impact of taking 50% from two.

It’s hard to quantify, but this feels right.