The Bee Shack Wildlife Meadow
Wow. Our front field, once a closely cropped pasture, is now full to bursting with meadow plants including: red clover, oxe eye daisies, field scabious, red campion and the charmingly named, Hedge Bedstraw.
It’s utterly beautiful and has taken the past 3 to 4 years to really get established. With simple mown paths it looks a little bit like those dreamy Timotei ads run in the 1980s-anyone remember them? I think they might have featured a white horse too-for extra romanticism.
It was always a dream to create something so beautiful and also so beneficial to wildlife. When we moved in the area had been grazed by cows. We added to this stress of the land by grazing our horses and ponies on it, both being notorious for ‘souring’ pastures by over grazing certain plants and leaving others such as thistles and docks to dominate.
Any young trees we planted were destroyed by said equines leaning over fences to eat them. It was all looking quite sad and over grazed.
The penny dropped as we realized we needed to sort out fenced paddocks which we could rotate and thereby rest the land.
We since planted hundreds of young native trees and sown loads of wildflowers seeds selected to suit our wet, clay soil.
We haven’t done anything complicated or technical such as removing earth and replacing with poorer soil more suited to many meadow plants. Instead, we’ve let the ground recover and then rotavated strips at a time and scattered seeds by hand.
We can now share this utterly beautiful meadow with our Bee Shack café visitors and all of the birds, bees, butterflies and insects who feed and live here.
We hope you can come and take a look on a Bee Shack day. The kettle will be on.
