Harvesting a flood plain meadow

It’s the first day of the seed harvesting season and I was on the rota for the Glorious Grasslands seed collection. I headed over to a reserve in the Cotswolds Water park and met the rest of the team.

There were a number of things that conspired against us though. First of all, the rain forecast for midday started coming in at 10 o’clock. Then, the second harvester which we have acquired this year failed to start yesterday and needed to be taken to be fixed.

But the main issue was that the land owner wanted to cut for hay this week and not all the flowers have gone to seed yet (in fact, hardly any have).

There are specific reasons why this meadow is managed like this, but it does mean that mostly only perennials are growing there.

So, we had to make the best of it. It’s a really important flood plain meadow and as well as meadow grasses, there were lots of greater burnett, salad burnett, common knapweed, betony, bird’s foot trefoil and so on. Not much yellow rattle, of course. But of special interest were the devil’s bit scabious, Dyer’s saw-wort and Dyer’s greenweed. These last two are not often seen in the calcareous grasslands of the Cotswolds.

We managed to collect seed in between the showers, but the process does not work well in the rain.

In addition, the collected seed must be dried out before packing in bags, otherwise it just turns to porridge. So we had to keep covering it up as it lay on the tarpaulin.

So, an unusual start to the season but very enjoyable. Normally we only get to see meadows once they are brown (most things have gone to seed). So it was nice to actually survey this in flower and see some rarer species.