Anja Murray: Making hay and enjoying a 'messy' garden while the sun shines

By July, purple flowers of tufted vetch began clambering through the tangle.

By August, tall heads of wild angelica were towering above the rest, their shapely umbels stunningly architectural in form. There have been near-constant meadow brown and peacock butterflies flitting from flower to flower, drawn especially to the bursts of purple knapweed that is so rich in juicy nectar. The gorgeous sound of grasshoppers has been a constant soundscape in the garden throughout July and August.

This is a garden where I've been attempting to make a ‘long meadow’, a wildflower-rich grassland habitat filled with wild pollinators and other insects. The abundance of colourful, naturally self-seeded wildflowers sustains a great quantity and diversity of insects, including many different butterflies, hoverflies, wild bees and moths. These, in turn, are fodder for the many swifts, swallows and house martens who nest in and around the house.

On summer evenings I adore watching these aerial acrobats speeding through the air, snatching up flying insects as they go. Now they gather each evening on telegraph poles, their noisy chatter I find reassuring as I wish them well on their journey south for the winter months.

Managing the garden as a long meadow is a contribution to supporting the many wild species that have been suffering greatly from the loss of species-rich semi-natural grasslands since the 1980s.

In a traditional hay meadow, the grass is left to grow tall through summer, then only cut in late July or August. Raking in and stacking up the hay in haycocks was familiar scene in times gone by, a memory that lives now only among older generations. As a child in the 1980s I adored the sight of haycocks. There are still a few places where people rake and stack the hay, the style of forming haycocks (also known as ‘rooks’) differs across country, like jigs and reels that have their own distinct style from Connemara to Cork. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, hay meadows across the country were harvested at the end of each summer to sustain farm animals through the winter months.

The consistency of late mowing allowed a diverse community of grasses and wildflowers. Typically, there can be as many as 40 different plant species in a 2x2 metre quadrat, and this diversity supports thriving populations of bumblebees, solitary bees, butterflies, hoverflies, moths, ants, ladybirds and other beetles, shield bugs, spiders, and craneflies. Hay meadows are known as ‘semi-natural’ habitats, neither overly managed nor left wild — a kind of balancing of the needs of nature with low-intensity farming.

But with silage now, our farms don’t have the same need for the hay meadow. The switch to silage was frowned upon at first, seen by many farming folk as a lazy alternative and too radical a departure from the skill of cutting and making hay. But with the relative ease of tractor-drawn silage bailers and the difficulty of making good hay at the end of a poor summer, silage quickly became a safer option for saving winter fodder. With easy access to bags of fertiliser too, grass growth could be enhanced and silage made repeatedly from June to August. Hay meadows, once present in every parish, are now few and far between.

Traditional species-rich hay meadows, a legally protected habitat type under the Habitats Directive, have suffered enormous losses in enormous in a very short space of time. Between 2009–2015, an estimated 28% of the hay meadows monitored were lost. This figure is likely to be an underestimate and tells us that in just one six-year period, Ireland lost almost a third of its hay meadows.

The impacts of this are far-reaching. Earlier harvesting of silage means that insects and birds aren’t given a chance to  complete their reproductive cycle during summer months. The widespread replacement of hay with silage is a major factor in the decline of many of Ireland’s wild bees, one-third of which are threatened with extinction. Grasshoppers are likely to be facing comparable declines, but we don’t have the data to know if this is the case or not. Birds who nest in hay meadows have also suffered. Corncrakes, also once present in every parish, have vanished with the meadows they once inhabited. smaller creatures.

Slowly, the message is sinking in though, and there are now some farm support schemes that effectively incentivise and encourage farmers to maintain or reinstate meadow management, creating space for all the wild species in these now-rare habitats.

All of this I ponder as I spend a sunny late summer weekend raking hay into haycocks. My delight at the re-enactment tempers the ache in my arms and my back from the physicality of the work. Once raked over, I sprinkle the flat little seed disks of yellow rattle across the cut sward. These I gathered back in late July, as a neighbour cut their flower-filled field for silage. Each seed head was already filled with rattling seeds, easily shaken out into a bucket.

For anyone thinking of making a long meadow in part of their land, now is a good time to collect wildflower seeds, especially with all this good weather. Field scabious, devil’s-bit scabious, knapweed and wild peas (vetches) are some of the wild plants whose seeds will be good to harvest right now.

The National Pollinator Action Plan has produced a free guide that tells you how to find the right wildflowers; determine when they're ready to harvest; dry and store the seeds; and use them to enhance floristic diversity and benefit pollinators too.