Churchyards are becoming ever more important providing habitat for wildlife that has been vanishing elsewhere. And in Paston we’ve decided to do our bit with our large and somewhat unmanageable churchyard..
Norfolk Wildlife Trust have surveyed the churchyard and prepared a comprehensive management plan, which they will oversee. At the moment we have snow drops then daffodils to the south of the church but then the grass has taken over. The plan is that come spring the early flowers will be followed by all sorts of wild flowers into the summer, and that the churchyard generally will be as wildlife friendly as we can make it.
So many mowers have been damaged that nobody will now accept the job of keeping down the grass in summer so PCC members have been “doing it ourselves” with strimmers but this proved immensely time consuming. Also to achieve the right soil nutrition for the plan all mown grass needs to be raked up.
As an experiment we had a volunteer afternoon on Sunday 11th October before our afternoon Harvest Celebration service and about a dozen were at work raking what we’d mowed, with plenty of children joining in. The mown grass got raked up into a big pile. Everyone had fun. The service following was joyful and enthusiastic, and the food welcome and declicious