Preparing and seeding the feild

The field viewed from the house after grass was cut

Day two. The field is prepped and seeded

They came, the harrowed, they seeded and they left all in day! It was quite a job. Normally, and ideally, the field would be prepared in advance but for various reasons the donor hay had been cut the day before, so it was a mad rush to get my field prepared for seeding asap.

According to the Wildlife Trust the seed should be taken off the donor site and spread on the new site all on the same day. We were clearly off schedule on this but I decided to go ahead as the hay from the donor site was still quite green (ie. there was still plenty of seed on it) and after all the planning it seemed better to have a go with a less than perfect scenario than call off the project. 

This is after all one of the reasons I wanted to write this blog.  Its one thing to read about how things should be done in a perfect world, but the vagaries of real life inevitably make a degree of muddle of the best laid plans. We'll see the results in the spring!

So first step was to scarify the turf. This was done with a power harrow (shown below). The aim is to scrape off the grass to bare the soil for the wildflowers. Its all about giving the wildlflowers a fighting chance against the grass. Rye grass as found in pasture fields is very vigorous, but does depend on a certain level of soil fertility which is why farmers muck spread.

Wildflowers and grasses thrive on poor soil. So the trick is to convert a fertile grass-rich field into an impoverished site for wildflowers. Not a quick job. To achieve this I have had the grass cut and removed at least once a year for 10 years, slowly drawing out the fertility in the soil, with the following result as recorded by Matthew Marshal from the Somerset Wildlife Trust.

In the large meadow there is limited cover of herbs with only common mouse-ear, creeping buttercup, meadow buttercup and cut-leaved cranesbill observed during the walkover survey. It was interesting to note that whilst the sward is dominated by rank species such as false oat-grass, soft brome, cocksfoot alongside Yorkshire fog and creeping bent there was a very low frequency of perennial ryegrass within the sward. 

So it seems the policy had worked! There is another site also being seeded in the village with the same donor hay. That site had not had the same treatment but was sprayed off earlier in the summer. If I can I'll get some photos and see the results of that method.

Getting the grass as close cut as possible in every corner of the field

The topper that cut the field on day one was a side arm machine which meant it couldn't cut in the narrow areas of field in between the tree plantations and get right up the edges. This meant there were significant patches of lush green grass dotted around the site. So I did quite a bit of mowing with my ride on. It probably made no difference but it more clearly delineated the area for seeding and I felt anything I could do to break down the grass strongholds in the site the better. 

Setting up the power harrow to scarify the soil before seeding.

Once the grass was cut the next stage was to' scarify the sward'. This means to scratch and break up the turf. We discovered quite quickly that 

a.the soil needed going over several times

b. with the spikes at the deepest setting, 

c. and at speed, in order to get the soil to look like this.

The purpose of harrowing is to expose the soil for 'seed contact'

According to the instructions the sward should be 50% bare, but in reality harrowing churns up a lot of grass which then covers the soil. So we spent some time scraping patches of soil around the field, after each go with harrow, trying to ascertain whether or not we'd achieved this. What we could see was lines of ruts in the soil and seed so we hoped that there was enough contact between soil and seed to get a critical growth of wildflower to overpower the grass.

Everywhere I looked there were piles of grass churned 
up by the power harrow

This did concern me a little, as I didn't want to mulch the soil and add to its fertility. So the guys very helpfully piled it up for us and we picked up great armfuls and took them off the site. I don't know whether this was worth doing, if anyone knows let me know.

The seed is spread

Once we'd got a satisfactory surface the seed could be spread. The 'seed' of course arrived in the form of bales taken from the donor site. It had been baled 36 hours beforehand, ideally it would be baled and spread within hours to avoid any heating up of the seed in the bales. So it was rush to get it out and complete the process by the end of the day.

The bale was loaded into the back of the machine (can't remember the name but I can find out!) and spewed out through a funnel and spread all over the field. Happily it started raining during the course of all this which softened the soil.