As the wildflower meadow challenge progresses it’s going to be more and more difficult to find interesting things to say about grass or seeds and the right time to sow them, so I will try and stick to the facts and leave the mellifluousness to the flowers come the spring. Well at least it’s flowers we are hoping for and lots of them. Talking to John, our resident ecologist (modelling below) I was rather alarmed to discover that it wasn’t going to be a case of plant a meadow bang done. This would be a continuing battle with the dominating grass and rich soils… the grass will fight back and the soil has years of nutrition (remember wildflowers like poor soils) not to mention horse manure to encourage the status quo.
This time we covered the ground in mypex, a woven ground cover, to suppress the growth of the grass as a ‘quick fix’ method to clear an area ready to broadcast the seed. We lifted the mypex back in November and spent an couple of hours dragging a rake to clear the debris, preventing this from rotting back down into the soil. We then scarified the earth a little and liberally sowed the seed and soaked it in. The recent frosts where just what the doctor ordered – the chill should help germination come the spring. We’ll keep a record of how things get on. It’s unlikely that all flowers will appear in year 1, some will take another year to establish but with any luck we’ll have some results in 2015. Should the grass threaten to fight back quicker than expected our next weapon is Yellow Rattle which has a parasitic tendency and restricts the grass, allowing other species to establish. I think we are secretly hoping that this method is more effective than the potato planting or turf stripping – although it takes a bit of planning, it’s certainly a lot easier. We finished off with a meadow experiment 3.1; this was similar save the mypex, we just attacked a patch with the mower then the strimmer to bring it to a similar state and moved in with the rake.
Fingers crossed for the spring!
Woodcroft Community Orchard 