Wildflower Meadow Creation

A sad but well documented fact is that 97% of the UK's wildflower meadows have been lost in the last 100 years. Well, today I helped do something about it. Taking part in a practical task day with the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's Lower Aire Valley volunteers, myself and a small gang of helpers spread wildflower seed over a large field, and in doing so helped to reverse the trend of our disappearing meadows.

In the weeks leading up to the task, seeds were collected from a donor meadow that has a healthy popluation of wildflowers. These were dried for several days under a polytunnel, then stored in a cool dry place. The field (which previously had horses on it) was prepared by the farmer, though it was only ploughed a few inches deep to break the surface of the soil.

Arriving this morning, there were 8 large bags of seed that needed to be wheel-barrowed a short distance from the car park to the site.  On arriving, we placed the seed bags at intervals across the field, and marked the field into plots. This was actually quite hard as the field is on the peak of a hill and so you can't see one side of the field from the other ... as a result, some of our plots were a little crooked, but it didn't really matter.

We then broke each plot down into more manageable sections, and set about spreading the seed. This was all done by hand. After filling up a small bucket with seed from the large bag, we basically walked up and down the field casting the seed onto the soil. The first plot was the hardest and we were unsure how much seed to use, but soon got a feel for how far one bag would go and thus how generously we should spread the seed.

Luckily it was a fairly still day so the seed went pretty much where it was thrown, but occasionally what little wind there was did change direction, resulting in a face-full of seed!

The task took about four hours to complete, and in the end our planning paid off - we had just enough seed to finish the approx. 7 hectare field. As I was pulling out of the car park, the farmer was just pulling in, and will now have finished rolling the field to push the seed slightly into the soil and prevent it from blowing away.

A popular dog walking area, we had lots of positive feedback from members of the public passing through the site, who seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. Hopefully when we return next Spring/Summer the meadow at Water Haigh will be a beautiful vision of wildflowers including betony, scabious and yellow rattle, and perhaps even some orchids. As well as improving the aesthetic value of the site, this will also have a knock on impact to other species by providing habitat and food sources for pollinators including butterflies, bees and invertebrates.