Biodiversity

A hand full of just pick cherries
Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary

Hawthorn Hill Nature Diary: July 2022

As July breaks across the farm the great untidyness takes hold. I live where the green tips of treetops meet across the greenstripe roads. The tangled unmown growth of the roadsides spills across ditches, through ramshackles fences past the field edge and the road. Pinks, purples, reds, blues, yellows. St Johns Wort, Thistle, Wild Raspberry. […]

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Bee feeding on Ox Eye Daisy at Hawthorn Hill Farm
Farm, Smallholding and Wildlife Book Reviews Farming Sustainable Farming

Messy by nature

There are farms with lines of white stones that pick out the borders of perfectly crisp lawns. Striped. Formal and formed. There are farms with trim hedges that behave themselves. Rectangular boxes of clean green lines that picture frame their fields. There are farms with fields of ryegrass and clover, uncluttered by wildflowers or weeds. […]

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