Grass to Glory: Wildflower Edition

I’ve had a long, simmering, desire to establish a wild flower meadow. The challenge is how to achieve this without tractors (adhering to our ‘No gas / petrol’ philosophy).

This is the marketing image for the seed mix I purchased!

There are a few challenges!

Primarily, the existing grass, (which is an intentional, planted, monoculture, not just a default of what grows absent anything else!), will out compete wildflowers. This can be overcome with persistent mowing which of course is a challenge for us. 

So I’m planning a few experiments / approaches and we will see how they work out.

Step 1 - Location

Need to decide where to locate the wildflower meadow. I’m going to try 2 options in parallel.

• One of our newer acquisitions - That we affectionately call ‘Big M’ (It’s shaped like a letter M, imaginative, I know). It doesn't currently have any trees, it’s low lying and floods occasionally.

  
  

• One of the ‘Vxx’ fields - It’s heavily horse grazed, so the grass is already very short.

Step 2 - Quantity and Timing

I’m aiming to plant in November. Apparently the options are early Autumn or Spring depending on the varieties seeded.

I’m aiming for about 1 acre total (aka 0.4 of a hectare, or about 65m x 65m or 200 by 200 feet). This is about 6 KG (13 lbs) of seed, roughly 300 Euros. 

Step 3 - Method

I treated myself to a seed spreader

What’s surprising is that wild flowers want low nutrient environments. A way to achieve this is to cut the grass and then remove the cuttings. I’m hoping I won't need to do this for the horse field. I’ll just (electric) fence off a portion of the field for planting.

For the Big M field, I will try and manually scythe half a hectare (1.2 acre) - This is ambitious!

Then in both cases, we need to ‘scarify’ the land - Basically remove grass matter that is matted at the base of growing grass. This will be another tedious, manual task 🙁. This helps ensure that seeds get into contact with the ground and not just rest on existing plant matter.

After this we can plant the seeds - This requires selecting appropriate seeds (Wildflowers, that like clay soil, that floods occasionally and can be planted in the Autumn). The seeds need to be mixed with sand to help make them spread. This adds a bit of weight and friction, helping seeds settle into the soil rather than rest on top. Plus it helps ensure you are not seeding too densely. 

After this, a light walking over the area helps press the seeds into the soil. And then we wait until Spring to see the results,  when I will send an update!