Hand harvesting cowslip
Finally proper weather for the Glorious Grasslands seed harvesting. Today’s site was in the very far north Cotswolds – a beautiful couple of meadows in West Oxfordshire.
I met Harvey and Lorna at the barns and got a lift over rather than drive the whole way myself. I spent the day with Harvey, and Lorna met another volunteer in a nearby field. Anna joined us mid morning for the botanical survey.
It was a very species rich meadow – over 50 species and hardly any grass. The knapweed was most notably in seed and it’s size caused harvesting issues.
There was an abundance of cowslip. This is an early flowering plant, but late seeding and the conditions were perfect to collect the tiny black seeds.
Although the bulk of the seed harvesting is done with the land rover and harvester, it sometimes makes sense to hand harvest individual species. I didn’t have anyone helping me today, so while Harvey was off on the other side of the field, I took a bucket and started to collect the cowslip seed heads.
There’s obviously a limit to how much you can get, but it’s super valuable to have a single species which can be added into mixes later. I managed to collect around half a bucket of seed heads. This doesn’t sound much but there were literally hundreds of thousands of seeds.
