Your gardening photos

Goldfinch8 wrote:

I have grown a wildflower meadow for the past 14 years with a few other wildflower strips around the garden. What advice I give is just based on my own experience of growing wildflowers every year and the bit of reading that I have done around it. I am certainly no expert on it. In reality, there is not much work to it all and if you understand a few basic principles, they are not that difficult to maintain and they certainly are rewarding as a gardener if you like that wild dimension in your patch. When I first planted a wildflower patch, it was a riot of colour the first year. What happens in subsequent years if you do not till the plot, is that some grasses become more dominant and some of the original wildflowers do better than others. In my own patch, different purple vetches, yellow vetchlings and different yellow birds foot trefoils became the dominant species as the years went on as well as some Red Clover. I was happy with that as a lot of pollinators were still drawn to the meadow every year but the variety of colour was not as dramatic as the first year after sowing. To maintain it, I usually strimmed it in the late summer, let the cuttings and seed heads dry on it in warm weather for a day or two and then remove them all. Wildflowers can compete better with grasses on poorer soils and by removing the cuttings you are trying not too enrich the soil. Over the years, even though I liked the increasing clover patches as it attracted many bees, it too enriched the soil by fixing nitrogen to it. This year, I decided to plant the meadow again as I wanted a more varied blast of colour through the summer. In early April I dug it with a fork and removed roots, scrub and small sods from it. I also skimmed off some soil with a shovel where I thought it was a bit rich or deep and used that elsewhere in the garden. I raked it to a fine enough tilth then. I waited 9 or 10 days for small seedlings to appear, and then hoed them out of it without being overly precise. Most of these were probably grasses and weeds for want of a better word. I did this instead of using a weedkiller. I then scattered the seed over the prepared area and gently raked it in. I then let nature do the rest. I did however water the wildflower seeds once in early May as we had a Spring drought due to good weather then and this helped them on their way. As the pictures above show, the poppies were in full bloom a few weeks ago along with Red Shank which is usually regarded as a wildflower/weed that enjoys broken or newly disturbed ground. (I have read that their seeds can lay dormant in the ground for a few decades until the ground is disturbed and conditions become favourable for them to germinate).They did well as a result of the ground being disturbed this year. The great thing about a wildflower meadow is that some of the colours come in waves as different species come into bloom at certain times. Blues, whites, pinks and purples are in vogue the last week or two in the meadow. There is also no worries about so called weeds appearing in it either and in fact buttercups gave my own wildflower patch a nice welcome splash of yellow in the early summer. Finally, what is fascinating and probably the most rewarding thing about a wildflower patch is how various pollinators and insects are drawn to it. Best of luck with it if you decide to give it a go.