Wild/no mow lawm/garden

diabhail

Hi,

This time last year I decided to leave a large area at the side of the house as a wild/no mow/less frequent mow lawn. Feed the pollinators and all that. I then cut and lifted the grass in late September.

Over the winter it developed quite a bit of moss (no surprise with the benefit of hindsight). At the same time compared to last year I have a huge amount of lovely cowslips growing, as well as dandelions and buttercups and I have just found some bluebells. So wild flowers are drifting in.
Do I wait until the end of summer to deal with the moss and simply go with it for this summer and cut low and scarify in Autumn? Or is there a window between spring flowers and summer flowers when I could cut and rake out the worst of the moss?
Or spot deal with the worst of the moss now?

All advise and opinion greatly appreciated.

TheBoyConor

If the moss is not doing any harm then why interfere with it? If you want an area to leave for nature, then leave it to nature and don't interfere with it unnecessarily.

Water John

Moss is mainly because of the lack of footfall. Depends on circumstances but the presence of some animals in the Autumn would be one way of minimising it.

macraignil

Moss is an older type of plant than all of the seed producers so it has been around supporting different types of life in natural ecosystems for a lot longer and plays an important role if you are looking to keep the area for benefiting nature. The other plants there including wild flowers and grass should outgrow it in the drier summer conditions anyhow so I don't think it would become a problem in a wildflower meadow. I get moss in parts of the lawn here and it disappears when the weather gets warm enough for the grass growth to get going without doing anything to it other than mowing the grass.

Harry Palmr

Yep leave it, the obsession with moss in grass is one of the weirder ones to my mind, esp if it's being left by policy.

diabhail

So I have been lookinh at my "wild"/no mow lawn.
I have a huge number of sow slips that found their way in from last year. They look lovely. I also have the ubiquitous Dandelion and Buttercups - so a riot of yellow.
I also have speedwell - with its pretty blue flowers, in parts with some daisies also. And some Lady Smock - with the daint small flowers
I also found two separate places with bluebells - how do bluebells spread?

I have decided to just see what appeasr rather than seed anything....its quite fun that way

tromtipp

Moss is good, keep the moss. To encourage the wild flowers you need to keep the soil fertility low so that the coarser grasses don't swamp the broadleaved plants or the more delicate grasses. Aim to cut it after the bluebells, cowslips etc have seeded, probably in mid to late June, and remove all the cut grass. You can then cut it regularly for the rest of the summer, not too short, but always removing the cut grass.

The dried hay from the first cut will be full of wild flower seeds, so if you spread it round on less species diverse areas of grass it should help get the variety up.

An alternative technique is to cut (and remove) grass until July-ish and then let it go to encourage late flowering species including knapweed.