(Wild)flower Garden

when planting wild flowers it is often easier to start them in pots so you can keep an eye on them and get them established well before planting them out. this works even better for perennials.

with the hot and dry weather we had a lot of starts did not do great until the rains finally came along later in the season. by then if you had put down seeds some of those would have gotten eaten by animals or failed.

other aspects of starting a wildflower patch is to remember that wildflowers are often opportunistic and will do better with some disturbed poor soil and not much other competition. if you're trying to get them going in regular garden soil or more fertile areas they can be crowded out by the faster growing grasses or other weed species so you have to keep an eye out for their seedlings and then keep some space around them clear enough that they can grow.

and then to complicate matters even further, some species will do better when interplanted with some kind of nursery crop. each species can be different.

in general i do not recommend ever planting a mix of wildflowers because i've been severely burned by those an had them introducing really persistent ones that are pests - had to waste a lot of hours weeding that i'd otherwise would have avoided.

three i'd be glad to have never introduced, speedwells (small blue flowers), forget me nots and mouse-eared-chickweed.

songbird

Dan Purgert wrote: ...

as a post script, cosmos are an annual and do well but they also are best planted into some disturbed soil where you want them as compared to letting them try to come up willy nilly. they are great bee fodder for later in the summer and into the fall until the frosts take them out. it's a great way to do a census on your native bee populations to have a patch of them and to stand there and watch to see which bees visit.

songbird

I (visually) caught a few bumblebees in the flowers this year, as well as what looked like possibly some wild honeybees. So hooray there. Especially considering most (all) of the houses here are otherwise barren wastelands of "suburbia gardens".

None of the flowers are / should be perennial (well at least over here in Zone 5 ... but then again, winters have been getting pretty mild, which is bad) -- but with that being said, they should be able to self-seed as well (if they've not all already become bird food :) ).

I'm not too worried about them migrating, when I looked up the mix of seeds I bought, none of them were said to creep or have wind-blown seeds. That being said, I fully expect animals or other insects may carry them about, but more power to the native plants!

I thought I had an epiphany this year. I have a some volunteer flowers and grasses in the front yard that are turning to seed. I clipped the seeds, mixed them in a 5 gallon bucket, and spread them about in the back yard.

The birds loved them!

Dan Purgert wrote: ...

one thing that also works well for me as a bee food is onion flowers. i try to get some going each season and leave them to overwinter so they are coming up and blooming in the spring. i usually see a lot of the native large and also the smaller bumblebees on them. not this past season though. it was so dry the native bees were mostly absent until it started raining in the mid-summer and then they were all over any flowers we had (including the onions).

bunching onions bloom earlier than the bulbing onions.

well, i hate to be paranoid about this but the seed mixes we used had some weed seeds in them and so it pays to keep an eye out on the patch for any pests that may have tagged along.

heading off a major weed infestation is really easy if you can get the first few that appear before they have a chance to drop seeds or spread further.

we have some other wonderful weeds that show up at times from the birds moving seeds around (poison ivy and thistles being the two toughest ones to get rid of if i don't catch them early).

right now i have about 1200 square feet of thistles next to our property that the neighbor had start in his farm field that they could not ever get rid of so i've been mowing it really short until i could talk to the neighbor about what they're going to do. and now it looks like they'll take care of it as part of putting that field into an environmental easement so i'm just going to keep mowing it short until they can deal with it. best approach for the environment is to manually remove it (plow it deep and then rake through with a cultivator to remove the roots and dry those in the sun to kill them off), but that's a lot of work so they'll probably spray it a few times and then i can spot weed it after that if any more show up. i will have to do that anyways. if you keep after any sprouts that come up they will eventually give up.

songbird

Dan Purgert wrote: ...

yes, we just mow what little is left of the grassy areas (but there's not much any more) and that self- selects for the plants that can survive that kind of treatment. we don't fertilize or water those areas either. interestingly enough, with minimal care it grows really well. the bunnies come along and eat most of the weeds out of it and it looks pretty nice if kept regularly mowed during the times it rains. we also mow pretty high and that helps keep weeds down.

we're in a similar zone (mid-Michigan) so the winters do have some effect on weeds and wildflowers.

i have some pinks which wander around and i always leave those to flower when they pop up in various gardens. then there are all the other hundreds of various weeds that show up and wind blown ones too which this past season was really bad due to the field to the south not being farmed any more so we had a literal tumble weed invasion of grasses in all the vegetable gardens and i had many hours of extra weeding to get those out of there. i'm hoping this fall it doesn't happen again. so far it seems to be going much better - but a high wind storm may change that so we'll see how it goes. :)

songbird

:)

we do not go out of our way to feed the birds but we do keep birdbaths for them and the birds are always around. i'm liking this arrangement since it minimizes pests and the birds have to forage for bugs in the gardens. keeping a regular water supply available also helps prevent some damage to food crops.

songbird

Oh indeed! I've got a little patch of chives in the one corner that are starting to spread out just a little bit. They're pretty when they flower (and, y'know, taste pretty alright too :) )

The batch I got was from a local (like literally 20 minutes away) seed house that specializes in the state-native wildflowers. So what came up was pretty solid (if only more did). Granted I can't say that the thistle and other unwanted plants I fight with in the garden *weren't* in those packets :)

Well, I mean, many would call my wildflowers "weeds" (and til they started flowering, things looked pretty bad).

INDEED. Thistles (or other spiky things) are the bane of my gardens. I'm going to have to figure out "something" for the shadier garden -- the weeds pick up there fine, but it's hard to get back there without squishing what I want to keep, so maybe some pavers / stepping stones to make the path look nice...

There's only "so much life" in a root (etc) afterall ...

i've had to remove a few hundred square feet of chives from a patch that started as chives scattered to try to deter the chipmunks. oy... the smell of chive roots is gag inducing to me. the other patch which we kept going until last year we've been able to just mow and the chives are being gradually replaced by grasses/weeds - much easier on me as long as the weeds are not spreading too fast i can control that edge just fine. the chives were able to keep the grass out for the most part until we started mowing them back.

it's a tough weed to get rid of, but gotten early and often helps a great deal. keep at it! :)

ha! :) you don't have a town ordinance against having tall weeds? we're out in the country enough that isn't an issue at all.

i've got a patch of those on the neighboring property so if i don't keep them mowed short they'll have millions of seeds. hopefully that gets taken care of the next few years. on our property there's a few small thistle patches but they get overgrown and i weed them out as i can get to them if they try to spread. rhubarb does a reasonable job of crowding out a lot of things but we've had so little rain the past few years it's not doing the job as well as it was before.

yes, especially if you don't let it recharge. :)

songbird

Yeah, I'll have to see what comes up next year / where its trying to migrate off to (and y'know, stop it)

Quite so! It doesn't help that the gardens here, while "manicured(tm)" when we bought the house were previously maintained to an unknown (albeit probably poor) degree of typical "suburban garden(tm)" in the front yard -- mostly all lawn and then some barren "garden(tm)" of ornamental non-flowering plants (or maybe a few shrubs that flower immediately in spring, but are otherwise crap).

Actually, I was extremely surprised that the impatients I threw into the little planter-box on top of my water barrel did amazingly well -- started out as nothing more than 8 kinda scraggly looking plugs (so MAYBE 16 plants, tops) and basically overflowed the planter by the time they finally died back (note to self, winterize that this weekend)

We do, technically, but nobody complained, and then the mid/late summer blooms probably helped a lot in that regard ("ohh, they're supposed to be big..."). It also helped that I talked to the neighbors on this side of the street that we were trying to attract butterflies (and their little kids fairies ).

What I really need to happen is next spring get more early-blooming flowers (even if it means plug trays or similar to get them going) so that there's a little more there earlier on. Also, plan out pavers / pathways so I can maintain things from both sides (as the garden is otherwise too deep).

Think I'm actually getting somewhere in a "forward" direction instead of it just being hopes on a piece of paper :)