Post 477 - A happy return to Haggewoods

Removing Deer guards

Hey everyone, Post 477 today and a quick one about a lovely morning I had revisiting a place I wrote about back in Post 410. It's a great project just south of York - Three Hagges Wood Meadow - essentially since 2010 they've turned an old barley field into a completely new and brilliant habitat, a wood meadow. It's now so full of wildlife and insects it's amazing. Even today, almost in November, there was lots to see.

I went along to do a bit of volunteering for the morning. A small group of us took some deer guards off a few rows of young trees that will be forming some hedges. That was quite tricky as you had to cut the guards off around all of the branches that had grown through them, but we managed.

Raking mown grass

The next job was raking up and collecting some of the grass that had been mown off of the meadow. This was hard work but nice to do in the lovely sunshine. I don't think there were any clouds about at all. It was soon too hot to have coats and jumpers on.

Sowing Yellow Rattle

It took a while to get all of the grass raked up. Dad and I did this while some of the other volunteers collected it up in wheelbarrows. The reason for doing this was to help the meadow by taking away the cuttings which reduces things like Nitrogen and Phosphorous in the soil. This makes it harder for the grass as there's not so much to feed it and that gives the wildlflowers more of a chance.

The other thing we did to give the wildflowers a chance was to sow yellow rattle seeds. This is a plant that also makes life harder for the grasses, it's a sort of a parasite and weakens the grass again giving the wild flowers more of a chance to get going. Well it didn't seem to take long for the morning to go, it was lovely being out in the meadow in the sunshine.

A young Toad

After that we went back to the table by the volunteer hut to have a chat. The main reason I went down was that I was invited by Rosalind one of the people who's developed the Hagges Wood project, who wanted to have a chat with a few people about some of the ideas I'd written about in the Yorkshire Naturalists Union magazine - I did an article called 'From Grey Beards to Green Teens - an engagement conundrum'. It was basically a write up of the event and some thoughts about getting more young people involved in nature and conservation. Well Rosalind,  Justin who was volunteering there, Nick a filmmaker who's done some work at the wood, Kat the project volunteer co-ordinator, Dad and I all had a great discussion and came up with lots of ideas. There may be a new project here in the making which I'll tell you more about as it develops.

So a great morning, during the volunteering I found a toad and two frogs in the long grass and we were treated to nice views of a Kestrel and two lovely (I think) Red Deer who passed over the field quite close to us and headed into the woods. I'll be looking forward to going back and seeing how the yellow rattle gets on next season!

Hope you enjoyed,

Z.