I’ve always thought of nature as a pretty robust beast. It usually wins in the end. But if you want to give particular species or communities a hand, then I’m not above taking the occasional short-cuts. Take wet grassland, for example. On wildlife grounds alone, they’re one of my favourite places to be - boisterous lapwings, elegant curlews calling, bedazzling dragonflies and the ‘plop’ that means I’ve missed another coy water vole. However, once you start to keep a site wet for longer than it has been used to, all sorts of things start changing – especially to the soil and the plants growing in it. Whilst all this change is happening, some plants can temporarily find themselves at a competitive advantage. Soft rush is one of those plants.So what’s wrong with that? Well, perhaps nothing – if you’re prepared to wait a couple of decades to achieve your balanced wet grassland plant community, and to have very little farm or wildlife benefit in the meantime. And if the site is very large, with little commercial value, it’s probably the better choice.However, the wetland restoration project I’ve been involved with at the Wall Farm isn’t quite like that. Wall Farm sits in the Weald Moors part of the Shropshire wetlands Futurescape. It’s a family-owned mixed farm, and the Dobson family who run it have been practising wildlife-friendly farming for many years. Neil and Stephanie look after the livestock enterprise, whilst daughter Georgina and her husband Jack oversee the arable side. There’s even a very young third generation (although their contribution to the farm so far mostly consists of splashing in puddles and viewing it from a back-carrier or all-terrain buggy).One of the projects they’ve been working on has been the restoration of one of their pasture fields back to wet grassland. The site has very peaty soils, which had been drained for many years.Back in 2007, the Dobsons and colleagues within the local RSPB team designed and created sets of shallow, linear scrapes (or footdrains) in the field with the RSPB’s rotary ditcher. Each footdrain was linked to the ditch next door through a buried pipe. A small wind-powered pump was put up that could pump water from the ditch, into the series of footdrains. The pump could be turned off and on, allowing the amount of water in the field to be controlled as needed. All this was part of an agri-environment agreement with Natural England.However, re-wetting can be a tricky thing to get right, and the first couple of years the field was kept very wet almost all the time. This was when the soft rush started to appear. Gradually, it developed thicker patches, slowly filling in the footdrains, and making the field harder to graze, even with the very tolerant local cattle. Local RSPB officer, Mike Shurmer, and I realised that if it was allowed to continue, eventually there would be too much soft rush for lapwings to continue to breed at the site.This year we had a plan. With help from the SITA Trust, we arranged for some rather special kit to help manage the soft rush. Eventually it stopped raining just long enough to bring out the specialist machinery – a tracked tractor from RSPB’s Ecological Services. The tracks meant it could travel on soft ground without damaging the soil underneath, and it came with some useful extras. The first extra was a front-mounted mower. Steadily, this worked through the field, and flailed the standing soft rush into very small pieces. After just a few days, the cuttings had mostly disappeared – leaving no mats of vegetation underneath which new soft rush could get a hold next year.After the mower, the spoil spreader came out. This was pulled along either side of the original footdrains, moving the sediment that had been trapped in them off to the side, and reprofiling them back to their shallow slopes. Next spring, we plan to use a weedwiper to knock the rush back when it starts to regrow. Hopefully this period of fairly intensive, but targeted, control of soft rush will give the wetland a chance to accommodate and find its own new balance. It would be great if lapwings returning next spring find the field to their liking – wet enough in the right places at the right time, dry enough elsewhere, and with enough little bits of tall cover (including some soft rush) and short feeding areas. Then all three generations of the Dobsons will be able to enjoy the sound of lapwing calling on their farm for a long time to come.