Any flower-rich habitats on the farm will look at their best over the next few months, both in terms of the spectacle of the flowers themselves and the associated insects, including butterflies and bumblebees, which rely on them. Peter Thompson (Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust) told me that any flower-rich habitats also attract hoverflies, which then lay their eggs in any adjacent crops that have aphids for the larvae to feed on, so such habitats should also act as a good pest control measure.
The maintenance or creation of a network of habitats that host a wealth of flowering plants throughout the summer period is one of the most significant contributions a farmer can make to support farmland wildlife. This might be by creating uncropped, cultivated margins or conservation headlands, which support rare arable plants (once termed ‘weeds’!) in the seedbank, sowing wildflower margins or nectar flower mixtures, or maintaining long-established banks of native plants, such as cow parsley, or keck as we used to call it.
I have the utmost respect for Simon Beddows, who reported in last week’s Farmers Weekly how he created a cultivated margin in his HLS for the rare ‘pheasant’s eye’ and over 1,000 plants have been counted there this spring. As he says, “I can’t tell you what a buzz it gives you when something like that happens”. I was privileged to see pheasant’s eye on a farm in Wiltshire when I was working with farmers on the Stone-curlew Project: by far the best ‘weed’ in my opinion.
On the heavy clay soils of Hope Farm, such management would give us little more than blackgrass and brome. Our only option of establishing flower-rich habitats is to sow them. our nectar flower mixtures have struggled this year. Being 4 years old, they are on their last legs and we will have to re-establish them this autumn. Even where we still have a reasonable population of legumes, they are not flowering as prolifically as usual – a consequence of the drought we have had in Cambridgeshire?
In contrast, our native wildflower and grass margin, established in 2003, is still thriving. This was part of the SAFFIE (Sustainable Arable Farming for an Improved Environment) Project, where we trialled the best means of maintaining the flowering component. Scarification, in our case using a power-harrow, proved to be the best way. In the past, we did this annually, but this was probably unnecessary, and we are now testing how frequently it needs to be done to boost flowers with the least effort. This practice is not currently allowed under Stewardship schemes. Although the wildflower seed is more expensive than the usual nectar flower mixtures, the savings in not having to re-establish it may pay dividends in the long-term.
The wildlife spectacle is the best on the farm over the summer months. As well as good numbers of the familiar butterflies found on farmland, we see the occasional rarity. Last year, during the Hope Farm 10th Anniversary farm tour, Kathryn Smith took a photo of a butterfly feeding on nectar in the margin, which proved to be the first, and to date, only record of white-letter hairstreak on the farm!