A massive thanks to our industrious volunteers who have been busy throughout the autumn and early winter broadcasting wildflower seed and planting wildflower plugs at our RSPB Winterbourne Downs nature reserve. This is part of the Save Our Magnificent Meadows initiative to enhance the developing chalk grasslands at the reserve with wildflower chalk indicator species that our currently missing or under-represented at the reserve.
We had local volunteers from the Salisbury area coming out on 13th & 20th November to help us create bare patches in clusters to provide seed beds for seeds of 21 indicator wildflowers right across the reserve. These sowings included butterfly food plants sown on the new butterfly bank, which comprised of the following: horseshoe vetch, devil’s-bit scabious, common rockrose, dropwort, saw-wort, carline thistle and wild thyme. We also added about 500g of wildflower seed hand collected by volunteers of the following: cowslip, horseshoe-vetch, kidney vetch, common-rockrose, sheep’s fescue, crested hair-grass, glaucous sedge, wild thyme, autumn gentian, Dyer’s greenweed, yellow-wort, common centaury, creeping cinquefoil, common-spotted orchid, fragrant orchid, frog orchid and pyramidal orchid.
The extended spell of mild weather has been most merciful in providing us with extra time for the big task of planting thousands of wildflower plugs. The plugs have had little risk drying out with the wet weather and short cold winter days. Local volunteers set forth on 11th December armed with trowels, kneeling mats and flasks of tea, to plant the wildflower plugs around the reserve, and on 17th December Claire Young, our Dorset Community Volunteering Officer, led a team of 7 Dorset volunteers to plant another 800 plugs. In the final push on 8th January the last 1000 plugs were planted by 7 local volunteers at two opposite ends of the reserve. These were nicely bedded in by lashings of rain the following weekend, in good time before temperatures dropped the following week.