{"id":625,"date":"2015-06-03T16:21:01","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T16:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=625"},"modified":"2015-06-03T16:33:19","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T16:33:19","slug":"make-hay-not-verge-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=625","title":{"rendered":"Make Hay not Verge Rage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Verge Rage breaking out in East Anglia ?\u00a0 BBC’s Look East is tweeting<\/a> about people in dispute over whether to cut flowery road verges for ‘safety reasons’ or to let them grow tall and flower for wildlife and beauty.<\/p>\n

\"verge<\/a><\/p>\n

Part of the problem and part of the solution is better management, which would mean more but smaller flowers and grasses. In short, cut the verges for hay rather than gang-mowing them, which stifles and kills off most flowers under a mulch of decaying veg’, and encourages a tall rank growth of a few grasses and one or two plants like cow parsley.<\/p>\n

As I discussed last May in a blog Blander Britain. No primroses at Primrose Corner<\/a>,\u00a0 sadly most roadside verges contain far fewer flowers than they once did, because they are over-fertilized by both modern farm fertilizer pollution and gang mowing.<\/p>\n

A change in County Council management policy could help resolve this problem and avoid it descending into Verge Rage.\u00a0 So if you are on the verge of raging against overgrown verges, please think instead about asking for this win-win solution.\u00a0 ‘Old fashioned’\u00a0 hay cutting means allowing plants to grow, flower and set seed which is great for natural diversity, and then (most important), lifting and taking away the cut vegetation.\u00a0 Each year this is done, reduces the rank vegetation, allowing smaller flowers to multiply and live side by side, supporting more insects and other wildlife, and even reducing the overall need to cut verges.<\/p>\n

Modern machinery such as ‘forage harvesters<\/a>‘ is used to do this on nature reserves.\u00a0 It does not need large scale hay making equipment, just a bit of imagination and organizing.\u00a0 From a conservation point of view, verges are incredibly important as they are some of the very few ‘natural’ spots left in our intensively farmed countryside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Verge Rage breaking out in East Anglia ?\u00a0 BBC’s Look East is tweeting about people in dispute over whether to cut flowery road verges for ‘safety reasons’ or to let them grow tall and flower for wildlife and beauty. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":629,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}