Thursday, January 23, 2014

The beginnings of a wildflower garden


It all started with a patch of muddy paddock where the cows had churned up the clay soil. A place where they were fed hay and in the process they had "enriched" the earth.

The cows had since been moved off the land and I saw the opportunity for establishing a wildflower bed.

I was sure it would work. Again I wasn't able to dig the soil because my shoulder was still recovering, so I improvised. I dragged a rake across the drying soil so that it was broken up 5 cm deep, per some instructions I had found somewhere on the internet.


Then I decided to cover the whole area with a 10 cm deep layer of composted pine tree sawdust that we had. I mixed that into the soil with the rake. After that I covered it with straw to compost more and to keep it moist.

I kept my fingers crossed that earthworms would move into my wildflower area and do their work, helping to make the soil deeper.


I checked after a month and it had worked, there was wonderful soil under the hay and hundreds of earthworms of all sizes!

In the meantime I was busy buying wilflower seeds:

- shirley poppies of many colours

- blue cornflowers

- yellow, orange and red cosmos

- red coreopsis

- linaria in jewel colours

- orange Californian poppies

- and lots more.

I was in heaven!

I finally lifted the hay off the prepared area and raked the soil to 5 cm deep again. Then mixed together all the seeds that I had bought and sprinkled them over the whole area. It was great fun.

Then I gently watered the seeds in and waited.

I watered every day and finally seedlings popped up. I was so happy. I carried on watering for a few weeks when the weather was hot and dry. The seeds should really have been sown at the beginning of Spring 2 months before, but I was lucky, my plan worked out.

Lots of smiles,

Rose x

Edit: You can see an update of my wildflower garden here.

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