Including acid soil, sandy soil, loam, clay sole and saturated soil and the silty soil found on the banks of wildlife ponds and streams. Like most flowers and grass you're meadow plants will grow best in an open, sunny, non shaded position in your garden.
However, it is not a problem if your garden is mostly shaded you can purchase and sow hedgerow and woodland plants or seeds that will tolerate shady areas.
In fact, if the wildflower lawn extends into trees or a wildlife hedge, grass banks and stony areas, etc. Unless the soil has been saturated with fertiliser or the lawn contains Rye grass you won't need to remove the existing turf. Most domestic lawn grass is not that vigorous to be a problem, but it is helpful to reduce competition by existing grass anyway by sowing "Yellow Rattle" seed into the lawn.
Yellow Rattle grows naturally in all established wildflower meadows and is sown between August and December as it needs a period of cold to germinate. How to remove Ryegrass from a lawn. When converting an existing lawn you will need to remove all trace of rye-grass as it is vigorous and will compete with your wild flowers.
You can't use weed killers because they are not selective and will kill the other grass. The only option is to meticulously dig the ryegrass out by hand, making sure none is left to spread its way back into your wildflower lawn. Or, and here's the rub, remove the complete lawn and re-sow with a hay meadow mix of seeds. Weedy lawn. If the lawn is full of weeds they will compete with wildflowers so will have to be dug out or treated with weed-killer Probably easier to kill of the complete lawn and seed with a wild grass and flower mix.
Mowing the existing grass. Grass preparation is fairly easy. You will need to cut the grass very short and remove the clippings from the lawn. Then, firmly rake the area removing as much of the thatch as possible to create open areas where seeds can get to the soil and germinate.
The transplanting method will be time-consuming and more expensive than seeding, but will speed up the appearance of wildflowers growing in your lawn. Transplanting meadow wildflowers from pots or plugs directly into your wild lawn is the quickest way to establish wildflowers into your wild lawn. They can be bought online as pot plants or as plugs and planted directly into an existing grass lawn.
Do not take plants from the wild. Try to mix the species and plant the wildflower plants informally, as if seed had blown in on the breeze. Depending on your budget, plant as many as you can for a quick effect. However, they will reseed anyway in the autumn after flowering eventually covering the whole wild flower lawn. Container-grown wild flowers can be planted out in autumn to establish over winter or planted in early spring before the grass has grown to tall.
The wildflower plants you choose will need to be suited to the type of soil in your garden. Work out the type of soil in your garden. This way is a bit slower than transplanting ready-grown plants, but achieves the best results in the long run and is relatively cheap. Select a mix of Wildflowers and Grasses that will thrive in the type of soil in your garden. Follow the sowing instructions on the packet. Sow a wildflower mix that suits your type of soil, at 1. Then rake the area over after sowing to help the seed into the soil.
As the seedlings start to show in the late autumn or spring, you will need to give your new wild flower lawn a mow, setting the blade fairly high to about 3in, this allows light to reach the emerging seedlings. In the following seasons your wild flower lawn should be left to grow to its natural height, to allow the flowers to naturally spread their seeds. More about this later.
Click the pic to see range of seeds. Wildflower Seed mats are suitable for small areas of lawn and borders they are biodegradable mats already sown with a mix of flower seeds. Therefore, all the hard work is done for you. Instructions vary depending on the supplier and type of mat, but couldn't be easier, Prepare and rake the planting area or border, roll out the seed mat, cover it with soil and keep it watered. For larger areas you can purchase special wildflower meadow turf. I have explained how to prepare the soil for turfing toward the bottom of this page.
This should appeal to folk like me who don't particularly like spending Sunday afternoon mowing the lawn. Turn away now "green lawn man". Just stop mowing and let your lawn or even a patch of lawn go wild. The grass will grow long and wildflowers will grow and colonise naturally creating, over time, a lovely wild lawn. This method could however, take a while, but if you are lucky enough to have a wildflower meadow fairly near to you.
Wind and birds natural seed distribution will speed the transformation up. If you choose to let nature turn your lawn into a wildflower lawn naturally. Take action Why take action?
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Quick facts. Jump to What type of wildflower meadow? When and where to sow wildflower meadows Sowing wildflower meadows Converting a lawn to a meadow Wildflower turf Problems. What type of wildflower meadow? It is important to choose the meadow that will be most successful on the site you have to offer: Perennial meadows thrive best on poor soils because the grasses compete less with the wildflowers.
If you have rich soil, it is worth removing the top layer and sowing directly into dug or rotovated sub-soil Annual meadows , usually of cornfield annuals, need rich soils. Soil so eroded and poor that nothing will grow. I even have a coffee table book Meadows by Christopher Lloyd that shows a very successful meadow grown on a vacant lot after 20 inches of peaty topsoil was removed so that the seeds could be sown in the sandy subsoil p.
My personal experience is that in the red, packed clay wastes where nothing grew 5 years ago, still very little grows today.
When our local clay subsoil there is no topsoil becomes compacted, it effectively becomes a brick and totally useless as growing medium in our hot dry summers. I have found that all the backbreaking pick-axing and roto-tilling in the world is almost totally ineffective without adding compost.
Shrubby lespedeza Lespedeza sericea. This is my nemesis. Three organic techniques hurt this plant: Mowing at 2. A combination of all three techniques works best.
I like to think it is a technique guaranteed to get me fired from any reputable landscaping company. It works great with a zero-turn on large areas or a weed eater for smaller spaces. This mimics the action of grazing herds moving through. The part of the meadow that I tilled and watered was essentially a complete failure.
I bought a large sprinkler, and tilled a circle around it that could be watered. Then planted a cover crop with a very very small amount of compost.
Even with proper watering, most of the cover crop would not grow. But the lespedeza and fescue were able to re-establish almost instantly even stronger than before. The hardest part is to get the most results with the least effort.
Burning is very effective against honeysuckle, especially where the plants you want to keep are trees over an inch thick at the base. Burning is not often super-useful in a meadow. The original picture gives a sense of the quality of the soil, compacted from construction equipment for the house and 4-wheelers for the kids with fescue growing well where there is any topsoil. I wish I could have, but I read the same suggestion in several books and lost a few years of progress as a result.
It was also ideally suited for my plow-and-watch-your-soil-erode episode. The other picture is from last weekend, 5 or 6 years later. The purple plant in front is Echinacea purpura. Beneath it are the first flowers of a Rudbeckia I think triloba. The yellow to the right of that is Coreopsis major, which I cannot recommend enough — it blooms for at least 2 months in the hottest part of the year without any water whatsoever. The tall dark plants with lavender flowers are Monarda fistulosa.
The brownish upright grass mostly in the back right is broomsedge Andropogon virginicus? My garden is beyond that and our horse pasture beyond. All the plants I named I bought in pots and planted in holes enriched with compost. I weeded them annually with a pick-axe and once a year hire a team people to pull the lespedesia for a couple hours right around September 1st. Glen p. One more technique: terracing.
Especially if you can make giant shallow bowl shaped depressions to catch the runoff rainwater from your roof. I think it is best to avoid planting meadows in areas that are naturally extra-weedy, or areas that are naturally devoid of vegetation.
These things indicate a very compacted area little or no vegetation , or lower spots where all the weed seeds in the area naturally migrate into as the field drains. Your comments underscore that planting a successful meadow is a little harder than it looks at first glance.
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