Flying by the seat of our plants

Nature is great isn’t it? It’s green, it smells good, looks great and is just really nice to be around. It’s so nice in fact that Pete Moran our Engineering Manager felt that our site needed a little more pazazz and decided to bring our Princes Gate Meadow to life!

Princes Gate Meadow

This project has been a year in the making and now fills the surrounding fields to our factory with bloom. The land is on the cusp of bursting with life as various flowers and wildlife are about to grace us with their presence, can you tell we’re excited? However, we weren’t always this fortunate. A year ago, our house of water sat next to a meadow full of potential but no plans or ideas on how to develop it, until one fateful night.

Pete our Engineering Manager was sat at home enjoying his tea when suddenly a lightning bolt of inspiration hit him that sent his green gears into overdrive! He was watching Spring Watch with Iolo Williams (great guy) who was discussing meadows and showcasing the wildlife they bring to the area. Realising that our patch of land could be developed into something special he came into work the next day like a Pembrokeshire based Captain Planet ready to put his plan in motion. After what we assume was an incredibly inspiring speech about the beauty of mother nature the big cheese gave his stamp of approval and sent Pete on his way. A year has gone by since that heart-felt speech and we’ve been fortunate enough to corner Pete on his break for a world exclusive interview with the man himself!

A sit down with Pete

The first burning question on our minds was how did Pete rise to the challenge and approach the development of the meadow:

“I’m not going to pretend I know the first thing about agriculture, I don’t.” ever the modest man our Pete.

“I knew I needed help, so I sent some emails around and got in touch with Nature Conservation Wales who visited the site and told us we had a lot of potential with this land.” he continued.

“He brought along a gentleman from the Botanical Gardens who provided me with a helpful list of info to follow step by step, great!”

With the feedback and direction from Nature Conservation Wales and the team at the Botanical Gardens, Pete had all the information he needed to get the ball rolling on this project. Firstly, he would have to prepare the field for the introduction of flowers to the area. Pete began this by planting Yellow Rattle seeds, these would suppress the tough grass and foster the perfect land to develop the meadow. But he couldn’t do it alone. 

Pete enlisted the help of Glyn Jones one of the original founders of Princes Gate Water who was more than happy to help transform this patch of land (cheers Glyn!). With his aid the pair began the process of preparing the grass and spreading the seeds: “We wanted to keep the seeds local so they are from Pembrokeshire, all I did was follow the instructions and it turned out great!” West is Best!

With the field prepped and the seeds spread the foundations for the meadow were complete and we’re already seeing new life crop up around the land. This has now left the door open for various other flowers to grow. Some of them include but are not limited to:

• Common Mouse Ear
• Ox-Eye Daisy
• Cats Ear
• Beaked Hawksbeard

If that doesn’t get your botanist sense tingling then we don’t know what will!

The future of our meadow

With the set up complete the question on all our lips is what does the future hold for our green-fingered guru and his field of dreams? “Well at the moment there’s only Yellow Rattle there but I want to bring more colour to the field and grow wildflowers in it.”

“Once that’s established, I wanted to ask local beekeepers to set up hives here so it’s full of wildlife! Going forward I’d like to see it develop and have a bit of diversity in insects and birds so I’d like to see that.” We can’t wait to see it grow!

This is just the start of our story but soon given some time and attention we’ll be fortunate enough to have a little slice of land packed with wildlife. We’ll be sure to update you with its progress over the coming months and make sure to keep an eye on our social media for some lovely images of the meadow.