The Meadow
The most valuable thing here is a field, and it is free.
Ninety-eight hectares of restored hay meadow, begun in 1994 with green hay from a surviving meadow eight miles away. It is cut once a year and grazed after, and that is the entire management.
Survey
Drop a quadrat anywhere.
This is how a meadow is actually measured: a one-metre frame, thrown or placed, and everything inside it written down. Move ours around the south meadow and see what the 2025 survey found.
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Drag on the map, or use the two controls. Counts are the mean of five 2025 quadrats in each block.
The cut
Once, in the last week of July.
Not before, because the yellow rattle has to set and drop. Not after, because the sward goes over and the aftermath will not come. One date, and it decides the next hundred years.
The hay is lifted within four days and goes to the dairy. Cattle come on in the middle of August and stay until the ground turns, treading seed in as they go. Then nothing at all until the following July.
- May to July
Left entirely alone. Paths mown, everything else standing.
- Last week of July
Cut, turned twice, baled and lifted inside four days.
- Mid-August to October
Aftermath grazing. Roughly one cow to the hectare.
- November to April
Nothing. No feeding, no topping, no rolling.