Well, that's not much good for our house. We're environmentalists. Aside from growing our own food, we want to use our land for growing plants for insects. So, way back in March, The Artivist and I started work on turning our front lawn into a wildflower meadow.
We dug it up. Not completely, we just wanted to remove some of the grass and dandelion roots to make room for our new flowers to put down their own roots.
We had these Beebombs that we'd been given for Christmas, so we scattered some about, along with some other seeds and we waited. Over the next few weeks, we saw a few pieces of bee bomb taken away by crows. We didn't see much sign of any flowers.
We tried some more Beebombs, this time germinating them in water and then placing the seedlings carefully on the lawn. Still after a few weeks they hadn't taken.
We learned from our friend The Allotmenter that many wildflowers don't do too well in nutrient rich soil. There's a flower called yellow rattle that drains soil of nutrients and it's useful to plant alongside other wildflowers for this reason. There are yellow rattle seeds in the bee bombs, so we hoped that if they came through, the other flowers would follow.
Eventually, in early June, we saw a few yellow rattle flowers pop up on our lawn.
And, sure enough, we soon started to see some other flowers coming through too. Vetch, buttercups, chamomile.
Later we saw nasturtiums, poppies and cornflowers.
It's not quite the full wildflower meadow I'd had in mind... yet. But it's coming along nicely, the bees and butterflies seem pretty keen on it already and I think next spring we can expect a nice array of flowers to bloom all of their own accord.
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