NO MOW MAY Results and Feedback
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2023
- NO MOW MAY Results and Feedback
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About Us.
Byther Farm is a small organic homestead, being designed and managed using permaculture practices. We aim for self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables for increased self reliance and better resilience to the modern world. I recognise that we are unlikely to be truly self sufficient, but do the best we can. I share our home with my loving husband, Mr J and our cat, Monty.
We are a fifty-something couple who live on a smallholding in Carmarthenshire, Wales. We are going green and creating a gentler, cleaner and more healthy life for our family.
Having had a highly successful smallholding in Monmouthshire, we hope to recreate the abundance at our new home. There will be a large organic kitchen garden with no dig gardening raised beds and young food forest in which to grown our fruit and vegetables.
We keep a few sheep and Aylesbury ducks.
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The council in edinburgh are going to leave some edges of grass that’s not being used for bees and butterflies
Scything must be so much less disruptive to bugs and wildlife than strimming.
No now May does seem like a good idea initially, but definitely has it's drawbacks. A much better idea is to allow it to grow until the end of June/July. If just allowed to grow for the month of May, most of the wildlife and butterflies will not have had enough time to finish their life cycle, before the grass is cut. Most of the butterflies and insects have laid eggs in the long grass and made the grass their home for caterpillars etc. as well as for frogs. May is much too soon to cut the meadow, as caterpillars etc will not have had long enough to develop before the grass is cut down. Ironically better not to let the grass grow at all if just for the month of May, if it's just going to get cut again in four weeks later. By that time lots of wildlife have made it their home only to have it destroyed again much too soon....
Mow twice. Early April and end of October. Works brilliantly for me, having tried most combinations!
Totally agree is some cases it does not make sense. Mowed lawns are essential habitat for lawn daisies and vitally important for song birds like black bird robin and thrush to find worms to feed their chicks. Plus they make oxygen so much for lawns being useless lol .Always leave a play area and a place for birds that love cut lawns to find food. Nothing better then an nicely kept orgnic lawn. as well as uncut areas
My results of 'No Mow May'? HORDES of mosquitos, even in the sunny daytime. Never again will I do this. I'll mow in April. Any more bright ideas?
Lets try a no spray May, after all its the pesticides that are harming the insect life. look at local councils spraying around trees and lamp posts which makes no sense, by the way if you have pets beware as they sniff around those places, Dogs and Cats are developing tumours. Many will try no mow May, then declare war on the weeds that have accumulated on there lawn, that the way i see it anyway. All repeat NO SPRAY MAY.
we love having the flowers ect in the grass, also saves a lot of time and effort mowing lol
We mow some and let the field grow for hay. It is a good year for hay - so much rain has made it grow tall already! Plus a good place for pheasants to hide and nurture their babies.
Did it last year but never again! Will encourage pollinators using other methods.
We live in the suburbs with a small front and back garden. The front lawn is really old and full of wildflowers and moss. I even found a wild orchid in it last year. The back lawn is new and mono cultured. I do no-mow in the front and the bees love it, but I don’t do it in the back as there isn’t much point.
This is lovely and very timely advice, thank you Liz. We left some big areas of no mow may last year on our smallholding, it was beautiful and at end of summer my OH cut it back with brush cutter/ride on mower,I let it dry and put it in a couple of builders bags and it has made nice interesting bedding for flockdown chickens . Such a lot of wildlife has been supported by it. We also left several large patches of clover to flower all season and it was teeming with bees. I am convinced we have a lot more solitary bees like tawny mining bees and hairy footed flower bees everywhere as a result, as well as so many more bumblebees around this spring.
Dock like comfrey it is an accumulator so not as bad as we think.🤷♀️
In a first-ring suburb which won't allow edible landscaping and certainly isn't going to allow me to dig up the front lawn and turn it into a vegetable patch. Privet or boxwood or other hedges between properties can be no taller than three feet, and the city doesn't accept "a metre is just about the same, only a few inches taller." When they say three feet, they mean three feet.
This whole time I thought you were saying “By The Farm”
Last year I ended up with a no mow summer and what a disaster for me. It was too wet to get a mower in and by the time I could, the grass was too long for the mower. The grass was so long that I could not get to the end of the one field where my walnut trees are let alone get to the dock that flourished, the buttercup that left the field bright yellow, queen annes lace flowered away unhindered and worst of all crab grass. I have ended up with these mounds of grass that are a nightmare to get rid of. The long grass stalks wrap around the strimmer head, and the time it has taken me to deal with the overburden of grass. All winter long and every chance I get I am out with the strimmer, especially the queen annes lace, which I strim every couple of days and hopefully will have got rid of it in a few years. It also turns out that I am allergic to queen annes lace which make it exceptionally challenging. I did leave one patch which is covered in dandelions and bumble bees. It is in a very wet area in winter and the ground is very compact so have decided that I will live with the dandelions as every one I have dug up has a bundle of earth worms.
Will you be showing the video of transplanting strawberries? I need to move some of mine because the bed is too full and would love to get some tips so they have the best chance of survival!
I have never heard of no mow May, but I like it! I have a section in my backyard (behind the fence where the HOA police cannot see) that I do not mow. I call it buttercup alley. I let them and other wildflowers grow up there all season. The butterflies, bees, and toads love it there. So I guess I was participating and didn’t know it😂
Love the fact you have said about what to do after May with all the long grass but I have been doing very similar things to this for the past 18 years and to manage it well it’s a lot of work and really no mow May might make us feel good but it’s a much longer term project as once you have cut it you have also destroyed a lot of invertebrates that the bats and birds feed from. So we have to be careful not to be destroying another link in the chain to biodiversity.