Herefordshire Meadows October Newsletter

Since the last newsletter, this year’s Meadow Makers have been busy restoring meadows supported by the Herefordshire Meadows team. Local provenance seed has been harvested from flower rich donor sites, sieved and dried and spread on recipient sites. Restoration works are completed on about 80% of our Meadow Maker sites and remaining sites are scheduled for the coming weeks. We… Read more →

Herefordshire Meadows August Newsletter

July has been a busy month as we have been harvesting seed from species rich meadows across the county to be used in the Plantlife Meadow Makers project. The harvested seed is dried and stored ready to be spread on the restoration fields later in the year. We also restored two sites using green hay – very hot work in… Read more →

Soilmentor training day in Dilwyn

On 12th July Annie Landless, Community Development coordinator at Vidacycle, led an introductory session to the Soilmentor app for 20 of our core group members. The Soilmentor software is designed to help farmers learn what healthy soils and flourishing biodiversity look like on a farm and enable farmers to make better informed farm management decisions. Participants were first given a… Read more →

National Meadows Day – Saturday 3rd July

Saturday July 3rd was National Meadows Day, a day dedicated to our wonderful wildflower meadows. To mark the occasion Plantlife launched it’s new Meadows Hub which has loads of fantastic information on how to make and look after a meadow. Here in Herefordshire we celebrated by hosting two events in Titley and near Bromyard respectively. At the morning event in… Read more →

Meadow Plant ID training session in Urishay

On 24th June Stuart Hedley, county plant recorder, led the second of our plant ID training sessions in the field at a site in Urishay. Participants split into small groups to carry out quadrat surveys and get to grips with common meadow plants, including some trickier species like cat’s ears and the hawkbits. This time, as well as in an… Read more →

Herefordshire Meadows July Newsletter

After a slow start everything is now looking very lush and the meadow flowers are blooming. June was the month to begin doing plant and bumblebee surveys and we hosted a number of in person trainings to assist people with this. All of the frenetic meadow activity culminated in two very successful events hosted in Titley and on the Bromyard… Read more →

Bumblebee ID training session at Trehumfrey Farm

On the 17th of June we held a bumblebee identification event, this time in the field. Andrew Nixon, of Herefordshire Wildlife Trust, began by teaching us about the fascinating life cycle of bumblebees. The first bees you are likely to see are the Queen bees, emerging from hibernation and searching for a place to start a new nest. By June,… Read more →

Catch up: What’s the buzz about – are all pollinator habitats equal?

On 8th June, Dr Paul Cross, senior lecturer at the School of Natural Sciences, Bangor University, gave a fascinating talk on some of the key challenges facing pollinators. Drawing upon data from several large collaborative research projects, Dr Cross presented the unequivocal evidence that pollinator numbers have fallen sharply in the past 50 years. Dr Cross then went on to… Read more →

Meadow Plant ID training session at Bromyard Downs

On 10th June we finally managed to hold our first, in person, outdoor, training session for over a year at Bromyard Downs with Country Botanical Recorder Stuart Hedley, former County Botanical Recorder Peter Garner and Caroline Hanks, Catherine Janson and Sue Holland all from Herefordshire Meadows. The aim of the training session was for participants to familiarise themselves with the… Read more →