Making A Wildflower Garden

How to start a wildflower garden.

Making a wildflower garden.

Before sowing give your spare space a good weeding before sowing anything as weeds will compete for light space and food. 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. Weed or remove sod by hand. Our wildflower garden is in a raised bed but you can also plant directly in the ground.

Prepare the area by tilling up any grass or weeds. 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. 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. You can plant a wildflower garden in early spring after frost or in late fall.

The flowers bloom all summer then the seeds dropped in later fall overwinter and then begin to grow with spring warmth and water. Wildflower plug plants can be popped straight into an existing lawn. There are two proven methods of doing this. Weeds are a successful wildflower garden s biggest threat.

These will become part of your new meadow. The wildflowers you use largely depend on your soil conditions personal preference and if you have a colour scheme in mind. 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. 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.

Then spread your seeds and water them every day until the flowers start germinating. After all that s how nature plants them. The soil for wildflowers is made up of bagged garden soil as well as compost and.