How to change your Lawn into a Wildflower Meadow

An increasingly popular idea is to change your lawn into a Wildflower Meadow.

This can be done and once established the wildflower Meadow can fill your garden with Bees and Butterflies as well as creating a lot less work and maintenance.

For a successful outcome follow these several steps.

• When a lawn is sown it is generally at about 40 grams to the square metre.
• A meadow is sown at about 4 grams, which is 10% of the rate. Meadow mixtures are a mixture of grass and wildflowers. The idea is to leave room for the wildflowers to be able to flourish.
• Often in lawn mixtures there is a species called amenity perennial ryegrass. This species is an excellent lawn grass but it's generally too competitive for wildflowers.
• To succeed then you've got to come take out considerable amount of the existing grass. You can do this in several ways.

Clear the ground.

This is likely to be the most successful route. You can either dig the ground over, kill off what is growing there now or use a turf cutter to remove the existing turf.

The aim is to get back to a clean seedbed. Then sow with an appropriate Wildflower Meadow seed mix in the spring or in autumn. Sow a mixture of largely perennials with a few annuals in it. Then you will get a colourful show in the first year and the perennial Meadow will come back year after year from year 2.

         2) Clear part of the ground.

With this approach you would clear the bulk of the grass that's growing there but not necessarily clear it all. You should aim for at least 50% bare soil. Then rake the ground and you have two options;

Firstly, sow a 100% wildflower seed mixture that's appropriate for your soil.

Secondly introduce Wildflower Plugs that again match your conditions.

Plugs will cost considerably more than seeds but give you a better chance of success when there's grass growing there already.

        3) Yellow rattle seed

Yellow rattle seed is a semi parasitic plant. it needs grass to be growing there for it to take. If it does take it will then latch onto the grass and weaken it. Sow Yellow rattle seed in the autumn. The winter period breaks the dormancy, and it germinates in the spring.

So, for example. you could cut the lawn back in the autumn and scarify the ground. Sow some yellow rattle seed at 0.5 grams to the square metre. When you can see that it's taken, then the following autumn sow some pure wildflower seed as highlighted before.

Clearly this option takes much longer before you can see the benefit of the wildflowers. But it's the most natural way of trying to introduce them.

When you get the preparation right, then you can change your lawn into a Wildflower Meadow. An attractive and Beautiful area for you and the local wildlife to enjoy.

Ideally There should be some grass there as a backdrop for the wildflowers. Once established you can enjoy the meadow for many years to come.

The pictures are from a customer who planted our Instant Sunshine Mini Meadow mix in March 2021 and enjoyed the flowers in the summer 2021.

We hope that this is helpful, but he did any more information at this stage please contact us by email or phone.

Phone 0800 0854399 or email shop@meadowmania.co.uk