Turning a boring lawn into a wildflower meadow part 2
My sentiments exactly!!
Here is a film of a lawn which was left a short period after I persuaded the owner to leave it uncut after seeing what flowers were there but never allowed to reach their full potential. It turned out to be the best bumblebee lawn I have seen.
From this…..
Just a few short months later and I had this vibrant, alive and literally buzzing wildflower meadow.
to this…!!
What is there not too like? I cut it once a year, rake off the hay and either compost it or use it for other ecological reasons.
Remove the lawn grasses
Admittedly the original turf removal et al was a job I could not do myself nowadays. I have made several wildflower lawns/patches over the years, from simply planting annual cornfield seeds, to using organic methods to kill lawn grasses and sowing wildflower seeds, planting direct plugs, wildflower seeded mulch mats and also larger pot plants into lawns. To be honest they don’t work as well as I had hoped as the lawn grasses soon take over again. This time every blade of the lawn grass, ryegrass I presume and the rich topsoil was removed. It was replaced with several inches of subsoil. This encourages the wildflowers to grow and as there is no ryegrass in the grass mixture, a better ecological balance between wild grasses and wildflowers can be achieved.
See lawn to wildflower meadow part 1 film
The turf arrives cut and rolled as long pieces of living wildflowers and grasses on soil ‘turf’, freshly cut, carefully rolled and delivered. It is then rolled out over the subsoil. As there were no wildflower seeds there were no birds digging up and eating the seeds. Nor did I have to wait for ages as the seeds to germinate and then grow, a very hit and miss method I have found. Very weather dependent, many seedlings die and birds/mice eat the seeds. No, I went the whole hog here! A blend of 42 different wild grass and wildflowers.
I used the services of Wildflower Turf who have a team of accredited wildflower turf installers based around the country
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