Creeping thistle away
Last year the Glorious Grasslands project helped to seed a wonderful meadow at Pittville Park in Cheltenham. The task this morning was to remove some creeping thistle while the plants are still small.
You don’t usually want to do ‘gardening’ such as this, but while the meadow is still young, the thistle can outgrow and shade out the other wild flowers. When a meadow is grazed early in the season, cattle and sheep will eat the young shoots, but this meadow is located in a public amenity area and not suitable for grazing.
For a meadow less than one year, it was incredible to see the variety and quantity of species. Yellow rattle, ribwort plantain, yarrow, purple dead nettle, mouse ear chickweed, musk mallow and more.
The meadow was well harrowed before sowing which makes such a difference.
Quite often I don’t get to see the results of meadow restoration, there are just too many to go visit again. So it’s always a pleasure to see that it does actually work! The long term plan is to harvest from this meadow so that it becomes a seed bank for other locations in the area.
I also heard about another project in the town, the Griffiths Avenue Reserve which requires a baseline botanical survey. This is possibly something that the Stroud Wildlife Survey Group can help with, so I’ll raise this with the team at the AGM on Sunday.
