Make Hay While The Sun Shines

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 It's high summer here and time to cut the hay meadow. It's counterintuitive but the flowers do better if the nutrients are taken away and I had a local farmer bale the grass up and take it away. The grass was bundled up into bales that were wrapped in plastic and kept as silage which is the custom these days.

I am posting before and after pictures of the meadow.



Another symptom of high summer is the lack of water. I remarked in my last post about our stream drying up in the drought and here is a pic of the dried up steam bed.

                                                                            Diary
A roe deer on the margins of the cut field this morning. Three red squirrels at the same time yesterday. A mother and two offspring? The youngsters are now so big it's difficult to tell them apart. Some people give them names and look for identifying features but I am not a fan of this sort of anthropomorphic treatment.  A fox in the camera trap in the bog meadow last night.

A lot of bats (pipistrelle?) about last night at around 2200 hrs.




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