My Mini-Meadow: Underwhelming So Far

October 25th, 2022

   When we last left the new “mini-meadow” experimental planting on my backyard bank in late May, the seeds were just sprouting.

The mini-meadow as it looked on Aug. 8.

   Germination of the 27 different seed varieties was good, and the bed looked promising.

   By the first week of June, most everything was up and growing at about two inches tall. And by late June, I had my first blooming wildflowers – a few annual yellow coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria, I believe).

   As the summer came and went, I got a smattering of this and that but never any more than maybe a 10 or 15 percent bloom coverage at any one time.

   Despite my anti-weed bed-prep efforts, some thistle, mugwort, and other weeds were already elbowing their way into the planting.

   In short, I’d rate the performance as just OK during year one. I’ll be curious to see which way it goes from here.

   A little background and some more details…

   I planted my 6-by-20-foot mini-meadow on the lower part of my middle back bank on May 9. This is an area that was weed-infested and likely untouched by human hands for at least 10 years before I moved in and began “dejungling.”

Preparing the bank with the help of a mattock.

   Before planting, I started a month in advance by digging out tawny daylilies, euonymus shoots, and assorted other unwanted vegetation with my trusty mattock and a lot of elbow grease. Then I cultivated, watered, and let new weeds come up for nearly a month. Then I cultivated those.

   I call this a “sucker-punch” strategy, which is a way of draining a new bed of banked-up weed seeds to give new plantings better competitive footing.

   For the seeds, I used American Meadows’ Northeast Wildflower Mixture, which is a blend of 27 different species. It includes native perennials such as purple coneflowers, blanket flowers (Gaillardia), and black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta) as well as annuals for first-year color and future reseeding, such as cornflowers, cosmos, larkspur, calendula, and poppies.

   As instructed, I mixed the seed with sand, scattered it across the bed, and lightly tamped it in. Then I kept the bed consistently damp with daily watering.

Seeds are sprouting after two weeks.

   So far so good.

   After the first few late-June coreopsis flowers, July and August brought a succession of light bloom of several other species in the mix.

   At first, a few white candytuft joined the coreopsis, then came a few calendula, then some blue blooms of bachelor’s buttons (cornflowers) and love-in-a-mist (Nigella).

   I also got some red poppies and orange California poppies before the bed became mostly a green patch dotted with weeds and mixed shades of four-foot-tall cosmos in September and October.

   I saw no sign of my favorite annual that was in the seed mix – larkspur – and I didn’t get any blooms of the biennials/perennials in the mix, i.e. Siberian wallflowers, shasta daisies, lance-leaf coreopsis, purple coneflowers, blanket flowers, blue flax, wild lupine, sweet william, and two kinds of rudbeckia.

   To be fair, the American Meadows instructions warned that I shouldn’t expect any biennial/perennial blooms the first year. These are to grow foliage the first year and then bloom the second year (and beyond, in the case of perennials).

This is as good as it got… the mini-meadow on Oct. 7.

   Meanwhile, at least some of the annuals should reseed themselves to bloom next year along with the biennials and perennials.

   For good measure, I’ve added some milkweed seeds that I collected from plants elsewhere in the yard and some hollyhock seeds that gardener Patty Flanagan of Annville sent me to try.

   I’ll keep you posted on how I make out in year two.

   My experience sounds like par so far based on the reports of a couple of other gardeners who wrote me after my initial mini-meadow post in May.

     Gregg Robertson told me he tackled a similar but bigger bank a few years ago in his Hershey yard and ended up replacing the meadow that he had plugged in with some 800 young native plants.

   “I couldn’t keep up with the weeding, and the invasives took over completely in the next couple of years,” he said.

   Robertson ran into all of the usual suspects… Oriental bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle, multiflora rose, mile-a-minute weed, and the decisive invader, poison ivy.

    He tried replanting the bank with native Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylanica), but after three years, weeds overtook that try as well.

   Gardener Mary Gelenser tells me she didn’t have a great experience either after planting a seeded-in mini-meadow around her lavender garden.

   “The first year was fantastic,” she said. “It was just gorgeous. I had more butterflies than I ever saw and bees galore.”

   But in year two, crabgrass and other weeds invaded the space. She tried overseeding with a different mix but got more grasses than she wanted.

   Like Robertson, she ended up scrapping the patch and replanted it with clover.

   She’s trying a wildflower mini-meadow again in a new patch, though – this time after not tilling the soil and topping it instead with newspaper and soil from another part of the yard. She’s watching to see if that makes a difference.

   As for my patch, I’m going to cut it down in a few weeks and let the stubble decay and seeds drop – similar to what nature would do in a meadow.

   Next spring, I’ll try to identify the weed seedlings and yank what I can to at least get things off to a fair fight. Maybe a little refereeing will help.

   But even if I get more flowers than weeds and don’t have to mulch that dreaded slope anymore, I’ll be satisfied. My threshold of success here isn’t very high.