After digging the potatoes, the ideal opportunity to apportion some land to a wildflower meadow arose. I’ve messed with various methods of wildflowers before, in a very small way, to some limited success.This has mostly been due to:
- quality of starting seed – having usually been supermarket deals, or small packs from garden centres
- lack of preparation – ie throwing down a wheen barrow of soil in the corner and lobbing out a scattering of seeds on top
- lack of maintenance – keeping grass and other competitive growth away
Knowing my own limitations, is something I’m getting better at, so even though we were in a position to cover about one eight of an acre, we decided to downgrade drastically. As the correctly recommended native Irish seed for our particular conditions – fertile and free draining – work out pretty expensive, we decided to devote 170 sq meters to our wildflower meadow and revert the rest back to grazing. This much cost about €80 including VAT and delivery I couldn’t honestly justify spending any more than that, considering how many projects I have taken on already and half arsed them.
This time we have the quality seed and ground preparation is as good as can be (without using pesticide) and have just enough ground to hopefully be able to manage, so things are looking good. If it turns out to be able to survive and thrive on its own, without too much intervention, we might expand it further next year. I’m excited to see how it succeeds and if so, the effects it has on the honey crop next year.
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