Equinox – time to ‘spring clean’ meadows

Ah spring is here!

Around the spring equinox, with daytime air and soil temperatures rising, the meadows begin to wake from their winter slumber. Fresh green grass shoots appear, yellow rattle germinates and cowslip heads start to push upwards.

Meadows benefit from some attention at this time to set them up for easier mowing later in the summer and also to help promote balance and diversity in the sward; a bit of a spring clean and refresh. I think of this as three main tasks:
• Grooming
• Levelling
• Trimming

Grooming

The first spring cleaning task is to clear any stray twigs, leaves and branches that may have blown in which might later interfere with growth or progress of the scythe. George Peterken in his ‘Meadows’ book describes how European wood pastures are raked over each year to gather up twigs, leaves and moss. This is then burnt and the ashes scattered back over…

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About Sadeik

You may ask why "Sadeik" well it means friend in arabic. Worked in Jordan a lot doing tree surgery you see. I have worked in forestry since I left school with a two years in Telecom. Went back to forestry and tree surgery as it may not have paid as much but was far more interesting and dangerous. Spent a lot of years mountaineering, caving and canoeing too. At 29 I went to Bangor University to study Forestry and soil science then did an MSc in Water engineering all very interesting. By a quirk of fate in 1995 ended up helping sort out the woodland and park at Wimpole, funny thing was then I only intended to stay six months or so, but 18 years later I'm still here learning all the time. That's the best bit, if I wasn't able to learn something new every year I would not have stayed and as you get older you realise that the grass is not so green in the next field after all. In fact my patch is getting greener while much of the rest is getting browner.

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