Finishing the ocean meadow

Second week for me at this site, and the third for Stroud Valleys Project. The aim is to restore the field back to grassland as it has become overgrown with scrub over the last few years.

I took my brush cutter PPE so we could finish some areas started by hand last week.

The biggest gain for grassland will be on the canal side of the field, where it catches the most sun and slopes nicely. So that’s where I concentrated for the first part of the day.

Managed to cut the remaining patches of scrub back to the main edge line, and then went over the whole area to get rid of isolated stalks. The rakers then came in and did a great job on removing as much nutrient as possible.

I stopped with the brush cutter after a while, because it’s only a small site and is pretty noisy. So the remaining time was mostly raking and shifting the arisings to habitat piles at the edge.

I think we were all pretty pleased with the final condition of the field, and a huge transformation from how it started three weeks ago. I walk past this once a month to do the riverfly monitoring, so will be able to keep a check on how it’s doing during the growing season next year.

There’s a bit of concern that the scrub will just encroach back straight away, but I think the grass has a good chance of dominating first, and will fill a lot of the areas previously shaded by bramble.