I’m going to shift for this coming winter from posts about our garden to pay attention to a five acre meadow we own, a meadow we are in the process of “restoring”,“rewilding”, “conserving”. In 2012 we bought this neglected meadow that had been a farmer’s field for generations until the farmer gave up and sold the land in the mid 1950's. Given this 5 acre parcel abutted 13 acres of meadow we had previously purchased from neighbors, this brought us up to 18 acres of meadow, all of which we protected from any development through the Vermont Land Trust.
Real Bazin of Bazin Farm in Westminster has successfully hayed those 13 acres for a few years, turning the hay into large round bales for winter feed for his herd of milking cows. In the early Spring about five years ago, we realized that perhaps 15 or so pairs of Bob-O-Links were building their nests, as they do, on the ground, nesting among the grasses abutting the meadow east of our garden. Real agreed not to cut and bale the hay in what was about 6 acres in the center of the larger meadow until after July 4 every summer. This allowed an ever-expanding population of Bob-O-Links to flourish. We think “our” Bob-O-Link population has likely doubled since Real altered his mowing schedule. I should add it is a marvel to watch these black and gold birds, who sing as they fly, land on the stem of a single blade of meadow grass.
The main reason we purchased the new five acre plot in 2012 is that it was adjacent to our own 13 acres of pristine meadow, yet this five acres was overrun by invasives: 10’ buckthorn shrubs with 2” thick stems, 5’ high Rosa multiflora, wild Honeysuckle, Euonymous alatus, poison ivy, wild grape vines and other woody invasives. It was disheartening to see what had once been a meadow reverting to aggressive invasives, a sight too often seen here in Vermont and across New England.
The eastern half of the five acre meadow – perhaps 3 acres – sloped down from East to West, at the bottom turning into a 30’-40’ marshy swath of Canary Reed Grass through which ran a stream fed by three culverts that drained a hillside across the Westminster Road. The meadow then rose up again for the remaining 50-70’ of meadow grass, punctuated by mature maples, basswood, apple trees and a couple oaks under which grew invasives and poison ivy along the roadside.
Mary and I had both grown up on farms, Mary in the North Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire, me on an orchard in northwestern Connecticut. Tending the land was in our blood. In the Spring of 2013, we set to with a will to put these five acres to right. Using my chain saw, I cut all the largest Buckthorn and Rosa multiflora to the ground. We piled the resulting brush and burned something like 17 8’ high piles of the woody invasives.
We then hired Joe King who had grown up on farmland not half a mile away. With his tractor-based brushhog, he mowed the grasses as well as the remaining smaller woody invasives, having to leave the perhaps 50’ wide swath of Canary Reed grass at the bottom of the meadow as it was just too boggy.
We then called Ellis Derrig to come along for a day with his backhoe to uproot some of the largest rootsystems of the Buckthorn. We made two or three piles of those and let them rot away.
Once all this heavy work was done, I used my string trimmer with a cord through which a wire ran, thereby having the strength to sever smaller multiflora rose stems, poison ivy, Euonymus stems and other woody invasives. This all took the better part of one Spring, summer and fall, during which we were also tending our 1 ½ acre garden.
In March, at the end of that winter, Philip Ranney, in his twenties and eighth generation of the Ranney Family who cleared all these meadows from mature woodland starting in the late 1700’s, came up with a suggestion. He thought it would be beneficial to do a winter sowing of clover seed over as much of the five-acre field as he could access with his ATV and spreader being pulled behind. He pointed out that the clover seed would fall into the cracks of the melting soil on the surface of the meadow. Ever since then, we’ve had clover throughout the meadow.
We abandoned the notion of haying any of that meadow and reverted solely to brush hogging it once a year in late Autumn, once the wildflowers had dropped their seeds. It was then that we began exploring alternatives with the help of Jennifer Garrett of The Vermont Land Trust and Cory Ross of the Windham County Conservation District. More on that in future posts.