Hello and welcome to the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group website and blog. Its’ aim is to provide and share information about how to restore and manage the county’s valuable resource of wild flower meadows.
There will be occasional posts, like this one, as well as more static resource web pages, such as those you can click on beneath the website banner at the top of this page. A big thank you to Isabel Macho, Carmarthenshire’s Biodiversity Officer (who helped host the inaugural meeting for a potential Meadows Group at the NBGW this spring) for providing much of the text to get the site up and running, and any meadow owners who have sent me photos to include.
How valuable the site becomes over time will largely depend on how many people visit it, and contribute to it. So do please post comments, or ask questions. This should be quite easy for you to do using the comments/reply boxes, or by clicking on the “Leave a reply” link at the end of the posts. And if you ‘follow’ the blog, (by clicking on the FOLLOW box to the top right of this page), then you’ll automatically get sent a link when anything new gets posted here. When you reply for the first time, it will take a short while before anything appears on the site – your comment has to be ‘moderated’. If for any reason, you comment, and nothing shows up, then do email me at the address to the top right, to let me know there is a problem. Thank You. 
If you have any suggestions for what you would like to see on the site, or have any images to include, then again do contact me (Julian Wormald, the current site administrator) at the email address to the side, or Isabel. But please only send me resized images less than 500 KB, since we have limited satellite broadband data allowances! 
Finally to introduce myself, Julian Wormald. I am a retired vet and meadow/smallholding owner living in North East Carmarthenshire. I have been fascinated by the complex interactions between flowers, insects and other wildlife for many years, and see huge potential for Carmarthenshire’s diverse meadows to become wildlife bastions at a time of great threat to these environments. I volunteered for this role in spite of being a computer technophobe, though keen photographer, so please bear with the site’s early glitches, but it seemed important to try to build on the enthusiasm of the spring meeting to get something up and running prior to the next few months, which are perhaps the highpoint of our meadows’ year, before things quieten down again, later on …
There are surely few pleasures to match a walk through a vibrant wild flower meadow on a sunny day, or the slow but exciting developments and changes of these complex habitats over time. I hope that we can all communicate and share with others some of this excitement, through this site. 
Thank you for reading.
Posted 28/05/2015
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Carmarthenshire Meadows Group - Grŵp Dolydd Sir Gaerfyrddin 
Julian, thank you so much for setting up this wonderful website, what a fantastic tool this will be to swap queries and ideas. I can’t believe you’ve not done this before, it all looks very professional to me! Also a huge thanks to Isabel for getting the group started, an awful lot of time must have gone into that.
I’m going to have a bit more of a play around on here, and then attempt my first proper blog (I too am something of an IT dummy).
Thanks,
Hilary
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Hilary, Thanks for looking and leaving such a positive comment – I always wonder what anyone else thinks of anything like this, so its a big boost to me, and I’m sure Isabel, without whom none of this would have come into being. I do hope that the blog/website can be a focal point for a group like this in its infancy, and that over time it will become an ever improving resource for all in the county – and maybe beyond. Good luck with your blog – I have indeed cut my teeth on another personal blog, and can encourage you that doing something like this is both hugely rewarding, challenging, and stimulating so good luck!
Best wishes
Julian
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