This month we met with Paul Murphy, the new Redcar and Cleveland Countryside Ranger. He brought along a butterfly information board and is preparing a frame for it so it can be installed somewhere near the Cleveland Way. This led us to discuss how we might create more boards to help walkers and residents identify the plants and creatures which live on Cowbar. That’s something to work on over the winter.
He also brought a pack of coastal wildflower seeds so that we can experiment with sowing them on a grassland patch he helped us identify on a previous visit. As he suggested, we have pulled up the creeping thistles from this ‘meadow’ area. Thistles are fantastic sources of food and shelter for a massive range of invertebrates, birds and small mammals but they are very invasive and can smother other plants. Cowbar has plenty of them and we are aiming for biodiversity and balance. Thistles support wildlife from stem to seed | PoMS (ukpoms.org.uk)
We will soon be raking aside the long grass, mixing the seeds with some handfuls of sand from Staithes beach to give them some weight and sowing them as close to bare soil as we can get them. We’ll also add birdsfoot trefoil and meadow vetch seed gathered from the pods all over the grassland this summer. With luck, they will all come through next spring to add to flowers already there includong yarrow, knapweed, clover and ragwort, and extend the range of plants that the bund and the verges are already encouraging.
