Jane Ashford is a Natural Infrastructure Officer with Plymouth City Council - you may have seen her in a series of videos we have produced about how we manage our grass. Here, Jane explains what the teams are up to as the season comes to a close.
This summer, I've been presenting a series of videos about the different grasses and wildflowers that have been sprouting up around Plymouth.
I have managed to find all sorts of colour in places where there once was only green, be that in parks in designated wildlife meadows, on road side verges or sometimes in the middle of housing estates.
The reason? Well this year, we have been managing 40 per cent of the grass in our city for nature. Instead of cutting absolutely everything, we left a number of verges which were of better use to nature than to residents, to grow - just cutting round the edges to keep paths and roads clear. A short back and sides, if you will.
These areas have been thriving with bees and butterflies and, in places, with flowers that ordinarily wouldn't have had the chance to grow.
With the summer now coming to a close (boo!) the time has come to cut everything back for the winter.
If we just left it, bracken and bramble would take over (the technical term is succession) and whilst we'd all get a bumper crop of blackberries next year, we understand that it's not appropriate for road side verges.
So, with that in mind, the great cut back has begun. But this year we're going to try something a bit scientific with the clippings…
Instead of leaving all of the clippings where they fall, we're going to try and bale as much we can, particularly in our designated wildlife areas.
We're doing this because when clippings decompose into the soil they act as a fertiliser. Fertile soils are not good for species rich meadows because they only encourage grass growth, which means smaller wildflowers cannot compete for space and light.
Therefore, the less fertile the soil, the shorter the grass and more variety of flowers next year. Higher plant biodiversity means more habitats for insects, mammals, bird and amphibians. As you can imagine this takes quite some time, but the good news is that we have started this process.
Full disclosure, though; we won't be baling everything. We simply don't have the resource and besides, many of the verges or green spaces that we've left to grow, are too small or too steep (remember more use to wildlife than residents!) to practically or safely get our baling machines on.
When we released our videos throughout the summer, some of the feedback we got was from people who said that where they lived, they didn’t have any flowers, just grass. Now just grass isn’t necessarily a bad thing (see this video for why!), but so that there are more flowers next year, this summer we did some wildflower seed harvesting.
Using the Kick Starters from the Plymouth Natural Grid, we carried out several surveys across the sites to determine which species were abundant and which were lacking.
One species that we wanted to harvest was Yellow Rattle which helps promote rich, diverse wildflower meadows by suppressing grasses.
Then we took a seed harvester, sieved out as much of the grass out as possible and laid the seeds out to dry before storing them ready to be spread and planted in places which could do with a little more colour.
It's fair to say that the grass-cutting policy has divided opinion pretty much down the middle. For every resident who tells us to cut more grass there is another who tells us we're doing the right thing. It's a really fine balance.
Thanks for watching the videos. It's been great to see so much engagement (and not just from my mum!). Maybe we'll pick up where we left off next year…