Making A Wildflower Garden

However as a rough guide you need 1g per square metre of pure wildflower seeds and 5g per square metre of grass and wildflower meadow seeds.

Making a wildflower garden.

To plant your own wildflower garden select ground on your property that gets the most sunlight. These will become part of your new meadow. Prepare the area by tilling up any grass or weeds. Sand helps to keep competing grasses at bay and your wildflowers will thrive in these nutrient poor conditions creating a garden that the bees will love you for.

There are two proven methods of doing this. Weeds are a successful wildflower garden s biggest threat. Wildflowers will establish best if planted in the autumn as small plug. You can plant a wildflower garden in early spring after frost or in late fall.

Before sowing give your spare space a good weeding before sowing anything as weeds will compete for light space and food. How to start a wildflower garden. Our wildflower garden is in a raised bed but you can also plant directly in the ground. It helps if the lawn is quite poor in the first place with plenty of weeds such as speedwell clover self heal plantain and bird s foot trefoil.

The raised bed was built upon a 2 inch 5 cm thick bed of 1 inch 3 cm landscaping rock for drainage and this is not necessary for wildflower gardens not planted in raised beds. Weed or remove sod by hand. For a display of wildflowers in a bed or border lay a couple of inches of inert substrate such as sand and simply sow direct at a sowing rate of 2g per square metre. The wildflowers you use largely depend on your soil conditions personal preference and if you have a colour scheme in mind.

After all that s how nature plants them. Wildflower plug plants can be popped straight into an existing lawn. Of course only you can determine what a weed or wildflower is but for the sake of simplicity you should start your garden with a clean palette and remove all existing vegetation.