Managing Orchards – Dalrymple Primary
Effective management prevents the grassland converting to scrub, helps support the floral diversity and enables you use and enjoy your orchard to its potential. An overly mown orchard floor is not great for the wildlife, but harvesting windfalls from long, wet, and nettle filled grass is not to be recommended either so to an extent, orchard floor management will be a compromise.
The following advice will generally help maintain the biodiversity you are likely to have in your orchard.
- The grass needs to be cut at least once annually, April being the most suitable month, to prevent large woody plants establishing and converting your orchard into scrub. Grass should be cut using scissors to a maximum height of 5cm and out from the tree trunk by 30cm. Whilst a low level of scrub can be good for biodiversity, if you let it encroach on your orchard too much your species rich grassland will become overgrown and dominated by tall grasses and scrub as the herbs and fine-leaved grasses are outcompeted. Scrub also makes it more difficult to manage your trees and harvest your fruit.
- Dry the grass cuttings on site and turn them to help the seeds disperse, then either remove the cuttings from the site, use them to mulch directly below your trees or compost them in a corner of your orchard out of the way.
- It is important to remove the grass cuttings from your orchard grassland, if they are allowed to rot down they will enrich your soil which can lead to a loss in plant diversity. Over time you will lose your wildflowers which prefer poorer soil and gain plants like nitrogen loving nettles instead. Low soil fertility, despite sounding like a bad thing, is actually a crucial feature of semi-natural grassland, which is of great conservation value.
Today both Primary 5 and Primary 7 were in the orchard cutting the grass to ensure we maintain the biodiversity and allow our trees to flourish this year. It was really important to be finished by 12:00pm. We were lucky to have a lovely dry day today to carry out this task. April is known for rain showers so we took the opportunity on the first day of the month to get this task done.
Primary 5 have started a new class novel called ‘This Morning I Met A Whale’. The children were asked to design a front cover and blurb using the title of the book only. Here are their designs. Great work everyone!
Happy Halloween! Have fun & stay safe.
