
The continuous rain at the beginning of the month made it impossible to harvest the last of the fennel seed, but with things brightening up we have been making good progress, finishing up some of the on-going building projects.
It was time to mow the wildflower meadow again, and not wanting to accidentally murder innocent field voles, we took turns walking in front of the hand-held power scythe, making lots of noise to frighten them out of the way of the blade. It seemed to do the trick, as we saw plenty running away and none were killed. I also moved a number of wasp spiders out of the way to a safe area of long grass. These impressive invertebrates are not native but do not seem to do any harm in the UK and they look striking amongst the grass in a Devon field. We probably seem quite mad to conventional farmers, but it helps us to sleep well at night, knowing we have done all we can to protect the creatures on our farm.

Luckily, this year, I do not have to rake and remove all of the grass from the meadow by hand, as we are able to load it into the tractor-pulled trailer and dump it in the compost pile. We are still at the experimental stage with making compost, but we hope that we will soon be able to use our homemade compost to make no-dig beds, rather than relying on deliveries of the council-made green-waste compost.