It's certainly milder now. But the ground is still hard enough to get the grass off the meadow in front of the lodges - just.

The cold snap gave Andrew from the farm shop enough time to nip over with the hay cutter and cut the grass - it's been on the to do list since the summer but the ground has been too wet to take the weight of a tractor.

Without its insulating thatch of grass the soil is still too wet and soft to take a tractor on more than one pass, so we're having to clear the cut grass by hand with the ride on mower and hitched on trailer. That's the hard work... In late summer the grass falls over, then grows up again, making a thick carpet that you can pretty much roll up!

Why bother? We're cutting and removing the grass to help deplete the nutrients in the field - and so encourage wild flowers. That's the long term goal and could take years before we get a really rich sward. But I also want to sow some yellow rattle, which is hemi-parasitic on grass, weakening it and letting other flowering plants get a foot hold. The trouble is it won't always establish on really dense grass, so in some ways this late cut is a blessing, revealing some bare patches. The seed needs winter chilling though, and should really be autumn sown, so fingers crossed and I hope it takes. Last year we sowed some in November, with good success. It will probably take a year or two of seeding before the population of this annual plant establishes itself firmly.

In the next few days I'll be out there stamping in the seed, hoping some of it will escape the throng of birds literally having a 'field day' on the cleared ground.

If you want to know more about yellow rattle, here's a brief online article.