Guest blog – Save our verges by Sarah Pettegree

Sarah Pettegree  has lived most of her life in Norfolk and owns the award winning Bray’s Cottage Pork Pies, which was named one of the top 100 social brands in 2011. That means she tweets quite a lot. http://www.perfectpie.co.uk/   I live in a perfectly beautiful part of North Norfolk.  Most of my journeys are…

Five short jobs, since it’s quite likely to be raining

1.  Support Plantlife’s campaign to make verge-cutting ecologically literate.  Have a look at these photographs from Nigel and Lois Harbron of a small patch of what is essentially a flower meadow which poses no threat to road safety and is bureaucratically scalped every year. 2. Spend two minutes to get a bank to give $5…

Better than an octopus? We’ll see…

With Euro 2012 now under way our minds will turn to football – won’t they? 13 of the 16 teams are members of the EU and therefore have designated sites as Special Protection Areas under the Birds Directive and Special Areas of Conservation under the Habitats Directive. After the last World Cup where a German…

This cut is a deep one

Today Plantlife launch a campaign to stop councils destroying the wild flowers of roadside verges through inappropriate cutting.  The wild plant charity says that they have been inundated by complaints from the public about verges being cut this year just as the flowers appear – giving them no chance to set seed. Plantlife Chief Executive,…

Bring in the bunting…

In amidst all that buzzard-bothering nonsense of the last couple of weeks an important restatement of the absolutely obvious was made: farmland birds have declined steeply and there is no obvious redemption in sight. The most recent science on the subject was a report produced from national bird monitoring schemes across Europe, including the UK,…