In 2022, we continued work at our existing paludiculture project site, also known as Water Works / Engine Farm. An issue for this site, as for much of the country, was the exceptionally severe summer drought which impacted on the water management of the site and on our paludi crops.

To protect the sustainability of local water environments, abstraction was suspended periodically. This meant we were unable to pump water from the IDB drains, to keep our paludiculture beds wet. Due to the prolonged heat wave and the need to provide overhead irrigation to the newly planted sphagnum, we had already exhausted our site-stored water. Unfortunately, the sphagnum has suffered, and we feared we had lost it. This would have been a devastating blow after the many hundreds of hours spent planting by hand. However, we sent off samples of the sphagnum hummocks to the supplier (Micropropagation Services Ltd.) for testing and, happily, results have come back positive – the sphagnum is still viable and our expert adviser, Richard Lindsay (University of East London) assures us that sphagnum is amazingly resilient. Given time, it will recover and eventually form a canopy. Even better is the evidence of my own eyes. Lorna Parker and I were on site earlier this month with our CEO Brian Eversham and our new colleague Marc Fletcher (WTBCN resources Director – welcome to the Great Fen Marc), and new growth was visible on the sphagnum hummocks. We just have to be patient now.

More good news is that the other three primary crops (typha, phragmites and glyceria) all survived the drought and are doing well. The secondary novel crops we were trialling (fen species for food, flavouring, and medicinal applications) have had a tougher time. Some puny plants have survived but have not formed a crop as such.  This is, of course, all part of the learning process and trials will always have successes and failures. It’s why we started small, after all.

The beds were rewetted once the autumn rains arrived, and this winter the water levels have fully recovered. Over the drought period the peat was exceptionally dry in parts and compacted, the latter the legacy of 100 years of drainage and arable cultivation. The crop growth, peat, water table and species monitoring of the site has continued, and we have been talking to UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology about monitoring GHG flux from the rising typha. 

The weed burden continues to be an issue, this in part is also due to reduced summer water levels; once these are stabilized the weed burden will reduce. Meanwhile, we are looking at other options for weed control in the sphagnum beds (including, potentially, limited and carefully applied chemical control, weed wiping, hand weeding etc.) Paul Trevor, Senior Ranger, has been organising volunteer weeding parties and we are deeply grateful to Natural England who nobly came out on an icy January 17^th and tackled those weeds, including some invasive silver birch.

All this practical experience of water management, crop selection and husbandry and monitoring, is building our knowledge base and creating valuable lessons we can transfer to our planned second paludiculture site at Speechly’s Farm. We are exploring crops and methodologies for our second site, and intend to trial a different system of laying down sphagnum in one of our trial beds at Engine Farm. This will be using the model developed by The University of Greifswald and the north German growers, using European sphagnum fragments or whole shoots sprayed over the plot and covered with straw mulch. We are also trialling cultivation of typha from seed (to compare that method with plug planting).

It's a great time to be participating in paludiculture research and there is a huge amount of interest out there. In early January, Lorna and I attended a fascinating two-day Paludiculture Workshop in Cambridge. It was organised by the Defra-funded Nature for Climate Paludiculture Exploration Fund in association with the University of Cambridge's Centre for Landscape Regeneration. Colleagues from UK conservation organisations, academics and scientists, farmers, growers and producers, UK government (Defra), business people and entrepreneurs were all there, listening and contributing to the presentations and sharing ideas and learning. Lorna and I were particularly pleased to see our friend from Germany’s Greifswald Mire Centre, Dr Sabine Wichmann, and the fabulous Aldert Van Weeren: a paludi pioneer and typha grower from the Netherlands (catch Aldert’s inspiring YouTube films. Aldert brought along with him a display of products (such as building materials and packaging) made from paludiculture crops showing the commercial potential these wet farming crops have. 

We had many fascinating conversations and came away with numerous UK and international contacts and links, including Sarah Johnson from Lancashire Wildlife Trust who spoke about the Winmarleigh carbon farm. As a result of this meeting we hope to twin our paludi sites with the Lancs WT sites!

We’re so pleased to be able to collaborate with this growing global community and are happy to hear from anyone who wants to share paludiculture learning and experiences.