Lashford Lane Nature Reserve - Saturday, 14 September 2024

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Blog by Sally.  Photos by Adrian and Sally

Regular readers of our blog will know that we have a number of trained scythers and this week, they were given the opportunity to hone their skills with the expert guidance of Nicole Clough of Joy of Scything.  BBOWT kindly agreed that we could use the Lashford Lane Nature Reserve for the Improvers Scything Course for the day.  

We met in the car park area for the reserve and Nicole quickly scythed a patch of long grass for the improvers to set up their base.  Six Green Gymmers attended the course and, after introductions to find out what everyone hoped to gain from the day, Nicole went over some basic safety principles on handling scythe blades, sharpening techniques and difficult scything.  The Green Gymmers were faced with long grass and also had to negotiate ant hills!  The perfect training ground for the type of conservation scything that we do.

Adrian led the remainder of the Green Gymmers for our normal Saturday morning session, which involved scrub clearance on the fen area of the reserve.  Although the reserve had been grazed by a small herd of cattle in the preceding weeks, these had now been moved to the Dry Sandford Reserve where we'd seen them the prededing week.  Much reduced in number mainly because of holidays and, of course 6 people attending the scything course, the four Green Gymmers who attended the session made very good progress. 

At break time, David had spotted purging buckthorn, a native shrub which is a valuable food source for invertebrates, with its black shiny berries.  We also saw a few butterflies, particularly after it started warming up when the sun came out, including a meadow brown and comma.

After lunch, and a very skilled demonstration by Nicole of the 'pendulum' swing of the scythe to negotiate ant hills (in this case) / tussocks / tree trunks the scythers soon got to work practising this technique.  Unfortunately, Margaret disturbed a wasps' nest and got stung by one of them, but a dose of antihistamine was quickly applied to prevent it from swelling too badly.

Nicole then moved on to reminding people how to care for their blades routinely and also how to repair them and keep them sharp by 'peening' - ie hammering the edge of the blade.  While this was going on, Sally raked the rest of the cut material and put it onto existing heaps.  This stops the grassland from becoming too fertile as that would encourage nettles to grow.  It was lovely to see devils bit scabious and knapweed in flower and the bees seemed to be enjoying them still.

Everyone got a lot of the course and were very enthusiastic afterwards and Nicole was thanked very warmly for her time.  We were grateful to BBOWT for letting us have use of their reserve and look forward to putting our newly learnt skills into practice.

Purging buckthorn

Nicole on blade handling and the parts of the blade

Setting up the scythes

Getting into the swing of it - no hacking here!

A Meadow Brown butterfly

A grasshopper basking

After the cut


A bee on the knapweed

An anthill 

A bee on devils bit scabious

Dieuwke and Graham searching for scrub to remove

One of the areas the Green Gymmers tidied up

Before our efforts

After a spot of clearing

After the hard work

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