Exploring a grassland meadow can be great fun, so let’s hope that the weather encourages large numbers of people to join the celebrations of this year’s National Meadows Day, on 3rd July. Unfortunately, modern farming techniques have reduced the numbers and sizes of meadows all across the country, so the opportunities to do so have progressively become fewer and farther between since the mid 1900’s. Nevertheless, Plantlife will this year be celebrating the creation or restoration of 12,000 acres of meadow land around the UK since 2013, as part of their work to address the huge losses.
Many of the projects we have recently supported ecologically have been designed to install renewable-energy sources in the form of solar-panel arrays, and we have been able to provide mitigation and management plans to enable wild-flower meadows to be developed around them. Some of the small wind-turbine projects we are currently engaged with will also provide similar opportunities.
Prior to development, the land had often been left unmanaged and was supporting a very limited range of vegetation, often of poor conservational value. However, afterwards there were many open spaces between and around the rows of panels or the turbine mast, where grasses and flowers could thrive and be left relatively undisturbed for much of the year. In addition, we have noted that a wide variety of plants will thrive in the shade of the solar panels too, provided that the soil isn’t repeatedly treated with weed-killers. This combination of habitats provides biodiversity “hotspots”, which can encourage a range of creatures to extend their living space and offer links between neighbouring communities which had effectively been isolated before development, at relatively little additional cost. Let’s hope that our plans will bear fruit over the next few years.
As with so many things in life, the recreation of the sorts of meadows which our parents and grand-parents remember so fondly is often not an easy task, because wild flowers and grasses generally prefer nutrient-poor soils, and the recent use of the land has usually led to fertilisers and pesticides being added. In some cases, the land we have worked with has been extensively enriched through deposits of solid wastes generated by waste-water cleaning processes.
Nutrient reduction/stripping work can be complex and expensive, but repeated mowing of the area for a few years, when combined with removal of the cut vegetation, can reduce the levels adequately to prevent the fast-growing, low-value plants from overwhelming the preferred meadow plants. Thereafter, a combination of sowing with appropriate native, local-provenance seeds and adopting “hay-meadow” management techniques, with a pattern of high-level and low-level cuts within predetermined periods, will enable each of these grassland areas to support a wider range and larger numbers of pollinators and other creatures. If you would like support in including areas of meadow land which can improve the natural value of your development project, please contact us.
National Meadows Day is likely to be supported by lots of organisations who may well be holding events in a meadow near you around Saturday 3rd July; why not check social media for opportunities in your area?
JP Ecological Services 