Muddy boots & blue skies

A small working party today – just three of us – and the kind of glorious blue sky that reminds and reassures you that Spring really is on its way.

We combed over the site for the first sign of the Horsetail (Equisetum)’s spore-spreading shoots emerging – they look a bit like tiny mushrooms pushing through the mud where we have removed the weed surpressing fabric laid by a previous plot holder. Unsurprisingly, given the wet soil, the project site is already rather over-run with Horsetail – it is a beautiful plant in its way, and an important food source for certain species – but, as any plot-holder battling with it will tell you, we certainly don’t need any more! Preventing it sending more spores across the site seems sensible and we’ll just pull clumps up by hand as, and when, we need to since it is impossible to dig it out: it’s bootlace roots can grow up to 2m deep and new plants grow from the tiniest bit of root.

Other jobs today included adding some hawthorn and hazel saplings to thicken the hedge, excavating a bit of a scrape to house some bog plants and hopefully frogs (this task got paused when boots got unexpectedly filled with muddy water), and beginning to level off the piled of earth behind the hard standing to form a more continuous surface for planting.