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Wildflowers take less time / work than mowing a lawn.
Flowering Lawns or Wildflower Lawns need only be mown every 4 to 6 weeks to 4 inches.
Nearly all
flowering lawns and meadows need cutting at least once per year, always rake up the cuttings.
In brief:
Cut the meadow with a lawnmower in early spring
before May.
Cut again in summer or end of summer.
Encourage new seedlings especially in the
early years by raking or 'gap creating'.
Nurture your wildflowers by giving the plants the best start they can have.
In return they will
attract wildlife, and thus improve the garden and reduce the need for chemicals.
In the long run it will be very rewarding and involve less work.
Some species will fix nitrogen in the soil and others will root deep into the soil and open it up.
If you grow our mixtures without grass seed an
established meadow will need only one or two cuts per year.
When you first
sow your meadow, do nothing for the first summer, enjoy the cornfield annuals
as they provide a riot of summer long colour. Cut the annuals in September, its best to rake them but if sown without grass, annuals wont really have to be raked in the first
year and the seed provides bird food..
In the second year, do
even less, as biennials reach for the sky in a blaze. Like Annuals biennials are short lived and may not return.
Eventually perennials will germinate and the meadow will settle down and evolve into a mature ecosystem filled with native species that flower over many
months. Its in the third year that problems arise, first because the true perennials are still small and have only sent up one flowering stem and the meadow looks bare, in the following year these perennials will grow stronger.
Read on,,,,,,,Index - Wildflower Growers Manual Home Page. The Wildflower Growers Manual is the expanded web version of our very popular printed Growers Manual.
Do nothing but enjoy nature
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