To help improve habitats for bees, butterflies and local wildlife in Milton Keynes, The Parks Trust have been busy collecting wildflower seeds.
This summer, the charity caring for your parks has been trialling a new seed harvesting machine across Milton Keynes’ green spaces. This new piece of equipment connects to a tractor and makes it easier to collect wildflower seeds from rich meadows, such as Stonepit Field in Great Linford. The cut hay is sorted with the help of their dedicated conservation volunteers who sieve the seed to separate from the chaff before being spread across parks across the city.
Lewis Dickinson, Senior Biodiversity Officer at The Parks Trust said, "Having a machine like this will be a fantastic tool to enriching the biodiversity of our grasslands across the city. Taking seed from rich meadows and spreading it at sites we want to improve will provide more wildflowers on these sites for pollinators and other meadow insects. The seed collector will scale our ability to improve the quality of our grasslands across the city and meet our biodiversity objectives."
Wildflower meadows provide a huge food resource for pollinators, providing nectar and pollen that they rely on. Pollinators are species that help fertilise plants, carrying male pollen to the stigma of the female plants. Many pollinators are insects such as butterflies, bees, beetles, hoverflies, and moths. Without them, many plants would not reproduce.
If you're interested in making a difference to your local environment, you can help by planting wildflower seeds in your garden. Check out The Parks Trust’s handy tips on how to sow wildflower seeds which include species recommendations and three ways to create a habitat for wildflowers at home.
