Yellow rattle

In Norfolk, we had a meadow area, created by our pond builder.  A meadow should be quite low in nutrients, so the grass is weaker and the meadow flowers have chance to develop.  He created it by digging the entire area up, burying the topsoil and bringing nutrient poor subsoil to the top.

We're trying to create a meadow area here, but we've left out the digging up stage, so we must expect it to be a slower process.  But one of the important early plants for establishing a meadow is yellow rattle - this is parasitic on grass roots, hence reducing the vigour of the grass.  We spread a lot of yellow rattle seed last autumn, but were starting to worry that it hadn't germinated, until a closer look a few days ago revealed many plants.  They're now flowering, and it's very noticeable that the grass is less verdant in the areas where there is plenty of yellow rattle.

There's not much sign of anything else interesting - just lots and lots of buttercups, but at least it's a start.

We spent a good deal of the day clearing the grass from around dying daffodils.  I had a moment of enlightenment.  When reading about naturalising daffodils in a lawn, there is no mention of needing to keep the grass trimmed between them.  But that's daffodils in an area of lawn grass - short grass developed especially for growing a nice lawn, that thrives when kept cut short.  Our house was built, just 20 years ago, in a field, and ì don't suppose they dug up the entire garden area and seeded lawn grass, they just left the field grass to grow.  Until we started doing things with the garden, it was just grass surrounded by a hedge, kept under control by regular cutting with a ride on mower.  So it's vigorous, tall growing grass, and it gets out of hand quickly in the area where we are trying to naturalise daffodils.  We've cut it back to allow light to the daffs as they die back, so they can get as much nourishment as possible into the bulb, and hopefully flower well again next year.

Well, that was a lot of musings and if you've read this far, you're probably bored stiff!