Phil Gurr wrote:
"mark" wrote in message
o.uk...


I've decided to help the bees and make a wildflower garden.

Action taken so far is to identify an area of back lawn for the
project and this has been culled using glycosphate but needs redoing
to get the bits I missed.

I've got a few packets of wildflower seeds courtesy of Coppella at
the Hampton Ct. Flower Show. I've also collected a few seeds
myself: poppy, ox eye daisy etc., and am on the look out for other
suitable seed heads. The plan is to sprinkle these about in
September. Never done this before so would appreciate any dos and
don'ts etc.

First and foremost - try to reduce the fertility of your soil as much
as possible and NEVER add fertiliser. Wild flowers do best in a poor
soil. Some of the seeds that you mention are annual wildflowers and
will only flower next year. You will only see them again if you
disturb the soil every year and this will 'upset' the perennial wild
flowers such as the oxeye daisy. Remember that grasses are also wild
flowers and should form part of the mixture. You can try to disturb
small patches of the area if you want to see poppies, cornflower and
corn marigold ever year - if you have moles, they will do a good job
of this for you! Be patient, a wild flower meadow takes at least 10
years to establish
and cut the area in the autumn and remove the cuttings to reduce the
fertility even further.
These are just the basics, wild flower growing is a very complex
subject.
Don't be put off: you can have a very nice display in a year or two. It
will never be a real meadow, of course, but who cares? The best start is
not really glyphosate, but stripping the turf quite thickly, which will
sharply reduce the fertility (stack it in a corner to rot into loam). I
grew one from scratch on part of what had been a parking area with about
six inches of crushed stone and very little soil at all, but even that
was past its flowery best after about ten years as grasses got a
foothold. Most grasses do this by the simple expedient of being
close-growing, perennial, and having a long growing period limited
mainly by temperature; but, as Phil says, that's part of the natural
population. Nothing wrong with judicious "weeding", of course...

--
Mike.