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On My Oasis – Focusing on Fields
First, some grim news. I had another break-in. Yes; that’s THREE in 10 days. And, rather than steal any birds, this evil scum smashed their way into the shed, pulled a nestbox from the aviary and squished the plucky male finch who was sat inside on his clutch of eggs. He, and the nest, were then just discarded and thrown to the floor.
Horrible. Just Horrible.
As you can imagine, it’s taken a few days to get myself together. I’m pretty shocked. We have a new garden alarm system. It’ll probably go off every time a cat, fox, bird, falling leaf affects the motion sensor. It’ll probably piss the neighbours off. I don’t care. I REALLY don’t care. If it stops this kind of thing happening every again, it’ll be worth it. To have a complete disregard for life and purposefully kill a little bird – these people need to get their comeuppance. The only unfortunate thing is I won’t be there to watch.
So….I’m trying to turn my attention to other things and focus upon this past autumn and what’s been.
As many of you know, this year I began the Wildflower Meadow Campaign. We managed to raise almost £500 to help buy the seed for a new 1.5acre meadow being set up in Suffolk. We sowed the seed in the spring, and last month we went back to check on its progress and scythe – can I just say that scything is extremely good fun!
Now – there’s a few things we’re overcoming. Firstly – whilst you need a fine till to sow in, we have undulating clay that nothing short of a tractor is going to sort out. I don’t have a tractor. Nor do I have a pair of heavy horses. As such, we have to stick with the undulating ground – in fact, I think it helped a little because there are GREAT flocks of wood pigeons, and the cracks in the earth allowed the seeds to find some safety. Secondly, though oil seed rape was not sown in the field, it seems there’s been some self-sowing from the vast Texan-esc fields of next door’s farm. So, scything these dry stems was made quite difficult, AND we were scattering oil seed rape seed too. Now, Suffolk has a problem with cabbage stem flea beetle – a bad problem. I’m hoping that if the oil seed rape germinates in 2016, the flea beetles will get in and help kill it off. In addition, we’ll do an early scythe to help cut off the young plants too.
Upon first inspection of the field, I was extremely disappointed. A couple of poppies made it, and Ox-eye daisies were abound. But that typified idea of waist high flowers as far as the eye can see? Ermm…not so. However, upon beginning to scythe I quickly realised A LOT of the perennial wildflowers had taken hold. That means that next year should be much better.
Also, it’s a bloody massive field and we’re doing the work manually, without anything larger than a strimmer! Eek. So, it’s a slow process. But it is a process. It’s also all an experiment. So, without further ado, here’s some photo’s from the weekend. I can’t wait to get back and do more. I can’t wait to get back and be there permanently!
Through that little gap yonder is the wildflower meadow.
Undulating clay is a challenge….
The scything, strimming, raking commences…
Ox-eye daisy proliferates.
Saad sits amongst the oil seed rape and watches his minions… ie. us!
A day’s work….only about three sweeps of the field’s width done!
A poppy survives the scythe. We left them all in place ready to self-seed for next year.
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