Management of wildflower meadows is always tricky and one where you will receive a lot of different advice.
This year rather than make hay on it, we (I) topped a few weeks ago it using a flail mower. This mulches the grass up, cutting it finely, so it won't sit in swaths on the top of the grass.
It should knock any remaining seed back into the field, put a bit of goodness back into the land (although we don't want too much for wildflowers) and stops some of the weeds (nettles and docks) spreading too far.
It's a tiny topper on a tiny tractor but our two fields didn't take too long to tackle.
It's been a few weeks since these pictures and the fields are green again already, I'll share some more pictures again soon of it.
How do you manage your wildflower meadows? When do you make your cuts?
Here in the U.S. we have an agricultural program called the Crop Reserve Program or CRP for short where we set aside marginal land out of regular crop protection to prevent erosion. All our lands enrolled in this program have to be planted in native grasses and on some of our plots, we encourage wildflower growth as well. We manage all our CRP land through burning. We typically burn once every two years in late winter or very early spring before the native grasses start growing. The burning discourages growth of weeds and trees as well as provides some nutrients for the native grasses. Since it mimics what used to happen to prairies naturally before they were settled, the native grasses thrive and their stands greatly improve since the regular fire removes their competition. We have a lot of big and little blue stem grasses. I'm not sure what is native to your neck of the woods.
ReplyDeleteThe burning doesn't directly help the wild flowers by spreading their seeds but by removing weeds and such that could be competition, it does help let the seeds that do fall to the ground survive and grow. We have collected some of their seeds in the fall and distributed them to other plots to propagate them further but that has been done mainly by hand. Your method would certainly likely do a better job scattering. Fortunately, wildflower seeds are biologically designed for such dispersal (by hand or otherwise) so we get fairly good results.
That's really interesting, and I love that it mimics what would have happened. I think in a way this does as well as it probably would have been mob grazed by big herbivores over a short period of time. Last year I was approached to supply some seeds for a new wild flower meadow so this is something I may lean into in the future as well.
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