Planting a wildflower meadow
Don’t miss a trick in your garden with our tips to sow a wildflower meadow this year. It’s the most simplistic and cost-effective way to plant an area at home.
A wildflower meadow in a suburban garden is a fantastic feature, offering a changing canvas of floral display that lasts all summer. This little oasis can attract pollinating insects and butterflies, as well as offering a relaxing zone to sit and watch wildlife.
Every day it offers a different make up of flowers and foliage.
Site and soil
Find a sunny corner, area or even a section of your existing lawn. Impoverished poor soil is best, so don’t be fooled with over cultivation or pre-seed fertilisers.
Preparation
If it’s a section of your lawn, we recommend cutting the grass very short, or strimming over. Then you can rip-rake over the grass and remove as much of the grass as possible. Hopefully, you will end up with a loose, friable surface. Simply then broadcast your seed onto the area as even as possible, press it down into the soil with a back of a rake and water in.
When to sow
We recommend sowing from late March to as late as May (the earlier the better) when the chance of frosts has passed, and we are seeing some night temperatures rising from above 5 degrees. Depending on when you sow you can expect to see the rewards from early Jun through to late September.
Maintenance
As the seed bed grows, it will produce flowers and in turn, new seeds. Eventually the colder weather will come, and the lush green growth will have turned brown. We suggest waiting until a sunny Autumn day and cutting off the seed growth down to the soil and gathering it together and shaking the dead material over the seed bed to release any seeds that are hanging on in pods. We also recommend removing any grass and indigenous weeds. Normally this will give you a wildflower mix next year that will be mainly the stronger plants that flourished in your area the previous year, rather than the mix you may have originally sown. The only way to maintain this mix would be to add new seed every season.
