Lawn into Meadow

tombrown

Hi,


As an experiment this year I decided to try and turn part (about 400 sq.m) of my lawn into meadow. I did this by just stopping to mow it, except for a few paths through it.


In Spring it looked great and we had some wildflowers come through on it (buttercups, giant daisies etc), and we were delighted. But as the summer has worn on the grass has grown much longer (2ft high) and is swamping everything. It gets flattened by wind & rain and now just looks messy.


Is there an easy way to try & fix this for next year? I read that stripping the topsoil will help, but thats too much work. Another thing I read is that sowing yellow rattle will help suppress the grass .. so I am considering that.


However, if this is going to take years to get right, I will not be popular with the missus, who is now pushing for a return to lawn


Any suggestions/advice?

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

The lawn area was probably too fertile for most wild flowers and this grass swamped everything. Cut the grass and remove the cuttings. It can, unfortunately take years for a meadow to form properly and is, frankly, often easier said than done.

fiacha

Grass is the dominant species in the lawn, so you'll have to change that in order for the wildflowers to establish and thrive. Cut the grass very low and maybe hire a scarifier for a day to remove a good portion of the turf. You can overseed with some native wildflowers to get things started.

If you haven't already seen it, the All Ireland Pollinator Plan website has a wealth of information available for free. https://pollinators.ie/gardens/

BarryD2

Wildflower meadows and roadside verges have become popular with Tidy Towns groups. But you can see in the ones that look well, that a LOT of management work has gone in. I think they've killed off the old grasses and resown the areas. Near us is one that was done more economically with a few plugs dug in at intervals. But as the summer has gone on, it looks more your usual roadside verge now with long grass and hogweed etc.

Was down in rural Clare there a while back, old grasslands, small fields - quite notable the variety of grasses and flowers just in ordinary grazing fields compared to where we are. I suppose because they're not been 'improved' much.

tombrown

Rural Clare is where I am, and there are some wonderful meadows around ... sadly not in my garden

FlipperThePriest

Something I'm also interested in at the minute. I have a front lawn and back lawn. Scarified the front lawn in Spring to remove a lot of moss and thatch. Then I overseeded with grass seed. The scarifiying really opened up a lot of bare soil allowing a lot of weeds to come through with the new grass seed and recovering grass.

The front lawn is used for play so the lawn is handy there.

But the back lawn not used so much, I plan to scarify it in Autumn and instead of overseeding with grass seed, I'm going to scatter some wildflower seeds in addition to the weeds and grasses that are already there. Maybe some yellow rattle too as you mention.

You say it looked great in Spring.. Would it not work if you not just cut it back as it begins to become overgrown with grass and let it start again? Would this encourage flowers to seed and eventually out-compete the grass, as well as stopping it get too messy?

tombrown

I'd love the keep the grass at about 6", but the problem with cutting it to that length is that (1) a lot of the flowers are taller (e.g. gian daisies) and so I am likely to cut them at the same time, and (2) raking up the cuttings when they fall on the remaining 6" of growth is difficult.

One (not the only) of the reasons for doing this was to make maintaining the "lawn" less labour intensive, but it sounds like that may be a pipe dream

FlipperThePriest

I suppose a cut every 6-8 weeks is less maintenance than once a week to keep a trim lawn, and you'd still get some nice colour. But yeah, not really sure myself what the best approach is.

scarepanda

zippy84 wrote:

I suppose a cut every 6-8 weeks is less maintenance than once a week to keep a trim lawn, and you'd still get some nice colour. But yeah, not really sure myself what the best approach is.

Zippy, do you have moss in your back lawn aswell? We have a lot in our front lawn, it used to be more moss than grass. partly out of laziness we stopped cutting regularly about 3 years ago and flowers started to come through. Now we purposely don't mow the lawn till the grass starts to out do the flowers and it gets a bit tatty looking. We seem to be getting longer between cuts now and an ever increasing amount of flowers, so you might not need to scarify.

gozunda

tombrown wrote: »

I'd love the keep the grass at about 6", but the problem with cutting it to that length is that (1) a lot of the flowers are taller (e.g. gian daisies) and so I am likely to cut them at the same time, and (2) raking up the cuttings when they fall on the remaining 6" of growth is difficult.One (not the only) of the reasons for doing this was to make maintaining the "lawn" less labour intensive, but it sounds like that may be a pipe dream

Meadows are traditionally cut after most species have flowered and seeded. The cuttings are then removed - this will keep the fertility low and encourage wild flowers and grasses.

If you dont do this - grasses and other plant will lodge together and the area will end up with a heavy thatch of grass and a mess of briars nettles and dominant weeds.

Borrow a good petrol strimmer with a cutting blade and cut during the next dry period. Rake and gather the mowings and dispose. Some summers may require that a second cut be taken in the Autumn. Depends on soil fertility and growth rates tbh.

Cutting once or twice a year is not too bad. The other thing to do is after cutting make sure to get the kids in to play football, have a party or whatever - bare areas will encourage more wild flowers from the plants which have seeded. This mimics what cattle do when they were used to graze summer meadows after being cut for hay.

Best of luck with it.

FlipperThePriest

scarepanda wrote: »

Zippy, do you have moss in your back lawn aswell? We have a lot in our front lawn, it used to be more moss than grass. partly out of laziness we stopped cutting regularly about 3 years ago and flowers started to come through. Now we purposely don't mow the lawn till the grass starts to out do the flowers and it gets a bit tatty looking. We seem to be getting longer between cuts now and an ever increasing amount of flowers, so you might not need to scarify.

Very good. But you still have moss there though yeah? The moss we had was choking the lawn completely, and hard to even go over with the mower.. pics below shows before and after of the front lawn. The back lawn is something similar, maybe not just as bad.





You can see it really exposes the soil, so might give flowers a better chance? The above lawn in the pic has since almost recovered btw, is back to being a lawn, just without the moss and thatch.

scarepanda

Ya, still have moss. Our lawn when short would look something like your first photo. We are renting, so I've no choice but to work with what I've got, but I wouldn't be in a rush to remove the moss as it seems to weaken the grass, or at least keeps it at bay and allows the flowers to grow. It's a bit tatty at the moment, but I'll try get out and take some photos of it later on.
Mowing used to take a bit of time, but I'd do it on the highest setting. My dad started cutting it with his ride on as it used to drive him around the twist, but now he does it only with my permission on the longest setting :-)!

If we weren't renting there's not a massive amount id change with it tbh, add in some early bulbs and seeds to get some colour in it earlier and later in the year and probably try introduce yellow rattle to weaken the grass even more and try get longer be between cuts. It's been a while now since the last cut and the grass is long in places but I've noticed some more of a couple of flowers the last week which I presume is down to the length of time since the last cut.

Graces7

BarryD2 wrote: »

Wildflower meadows and roadside verges have become popular with Tidy Towns groups. But you can see in the ones that look well, that a LOT of management work has gone in. I think they've killed off the old grasses and resown the areas. Near us is one that was done more economically with a few plugs dug in at intervals. But as the summer has gone on, it looks more your usual roadside verge now with long grass and hogweed etc.

Was down in rural Clare there a while back, old grasslands, small fields - quite notable the variety of grasses and flowers just in ordinary grazing fields compared to where we are. I suppose because they're not been 'improved' much.

the same is happening in the field here. Before I came the neighbours annexed it for grazing their cattle and the patch at the back was smooth rich grass. This is the second year of no cows and while the field is rich in wild flowers the back patch is long grass .

magicbastarder

just watched some of gardener's world from last night, we recorded it. it was a special on wildflower meadows - the bit we saw was about the value of established meadows, so i can't say whether they went into detail on how to create your own to any great depth.

worth keeping an eye out for, i've a hunch it's repeated at some point, definitely so with a version which is signed for the deaf.

scarepanda

I thought it was really good. I'll try catch it again during the week. I really loved the clip about the 'butterfly' brothers, really liked the garden that they were showing that they designed.

macraignil

magicbastarder wrote: »

just watched some of gardener's world from last night, we recorded it. it was a special on wildflower meadows - the bit we saw was about the value of established meadows, so i can't say whether they went into detail on how to create your own to any great depth.

worth keeping an eye out for, i've a hunch it's repeated at some point, definitely so with a version which is signed for the deaf.

I saw the program on Friday night and they did have a woman talking about how to establish a wild flower meadow. She recommended to start off with a limited amount of the area to start with to allow time for removing problematic perennial weeds like doc leaves that would take away from the more pollinator friendly wild flowers getting established. She mentioned just rooting out the problem plants as the season goes on and suggested once the meadow was established these would be less of a problem. They made the point that if someone was to take on too big an area to turn into a wild flower meadow in one go that it could become too much work to control undesirable plants and they might get discouraged and give up on the project. Good episode of gardeners world to watch if you can get to see it.

FlipperThePriest