Meagre pickings at the water park

Headed over to the Cotswolds Water Parks today for seed harvesting with Glorious Grasslands. It’s a site I’ve done a couple of times in the past – a nice neutral meadow in the middle of these gravel pit lakes that have been build around over the years.

It all appeared promising the night before with a 5% prediction of rain (which I know means might happen, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it). Right from the start it didn’t look promising as the ground was still damp from the night before.

We gave one shot round, but the grass just tangles in the brush and has to be cut out. And the very little that came out was difficult to sift as the seeds just stick to the grass. On top of all that, it started to then rain lightly mid morning.

So we resorted to hand harvesting since there were large clumps of tufted vetch that had seed pods ready to drop. This is obviously not as large scale as the harvester but is a useful technique sometimes when you want to target specific species.

The meadowsweet was also in seed and that is a joy to hand harvest – the seed heads crumble into your hand as you pick.

It dried up enough to continue after lunch, but overall the haul was very light – around 10kg for the whole day. But we particularly need lowland neutral meadow seed this year, so it was still worth getting every kg we can.