Preparing the ground for my wildflower meadow

I’ve just finished hoeing my wildflower meadow in preparation for spring sowing.

Wildflower meadows are tricky customers, and not as easy as some people would have you believe. Plenty of organisations sell wildflower seeds now, and even ‘seed-bombs’ which are designed to be chucked at will, and create an instant wild patch (poor will…)

The problem is weeds.

Now some people might say that all wildflowers are weeds, and in some ways they’re right. Weeds are generally just plants that grow where you don’t want them to, and if you’re growing a nice crop of peas or wheat, then you don’t really want a load of wildflowers growing up in the middle of them. A) they’re ‘stealing’ water and nutrients from your crop, and B) they might even be poisonous, causing some tricky problems on harvesting.

So we’ve rid our fields of any invaders, and put lots of nitrogen on to help our crops grow. The problem is, that nitrogen isn’t great for a lot of wildflowers either, which is why they struggle to grow, even on field margins. What most of them need is rubbish soil, in which even our more determined common garden weeds struggle to grow.

Well, I’ve got good soil in my garden, or fertile soil anyway. Which means that every year, a whole raft of weeds pop up in my meadow: dandelions, bindweed, cleavers, groundsel, and it’s really hard to weed it without pulling out the good plants as well.

This means I have to opt for an annual meadow (cornfield annuals they’re usually called) a mix of cornflowers, poppies, corn marigolds and Mayweed. It’s quite beautiful, but needs to be sown every year, and I need to weed the soil before I get started to try to give the seeds a chance against the competition.

I dug it last year, but it takes ages, and I think it just encourages even more weeds to sprout! This year, I’m taking advantage of the sunny days in February to give it a good hoe, disturbing only the top couple of inches of soil. It’s much faster, and not nearly as laborious as digging, and it means I can hoe it again in a few weeks, just before I sow.

This year, I’m also considering putting in some sunflowers amongst the wildflowers. I’ve done it a bit before, but it’s quite tricky due to the fact that you plant out sunflowers as small plants rather than seeds (or they don’t tend to do as well) and you do it in April or May, at which point the meadow will already be sprouting.

The purpose of the sunflowers is to reduce the fertility of the soil a bit, but they also look great in their own right, and are terrific for bees and hoverflies! I think I’ll put them in blocks and see how it works out. But if the whole meadow looks anything like it has done in recent years, I’ll be quite content!