Wildflower Planting in Llandrindod Wells
Another spring day spent planting wildflowers. This time the wind blew us back to the rolling hills of Llandrindod Wells, Wales. The site is right beside one spot where we’d planted 1300 trees back in 2020. We’re pleased to say they’re doing spectacularly. Additionally, we’ve planted another acre meadow in Coventry.
Onto this new patch, then. With shallow soil and rocks beneath it, it’s been deemed unsuitable for planting woodland. Still, that doesn’t mean we weren’t going to make the most of it! Leaving it bare would’ve been a travesty, especially since there are several bee hives sitting at the bottom of the field, all hankering for a good, local meal. So, we got stuck into planting some flowers for them, so they’ll one day benefit from the scrummy pollen and nectar.
Starting off with open, baren ground—to give the project the best chance to succeed—we set to work spreading hundreds of thousands of wildflower seeds. We opted for the low tech method of hand-spreading to get the job done, as the seed mix was a little too fine for machinery. There had to be thrown just 4 grams of mix per square metre; each and every seed locally sourced from the wildflower meadows of Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. We even mixed in some grass species’, like Sweet Vernal grass, Crested dog's-tail and Red Fescue.
This site is a good example that trees aren’t the solution for everywhere. After a thin layer of soil it’s mostly rocks underneath so it would have been too shallow for trees to thrive. At the bottom there are some bee hives, they’re gonna love the flowers when they arrive.
The seeds which are two-tone discs are yellow rattles, and there are plenty of them. These are particularly important here as they parasitise grasses, weakening them, and preventing them competing with our flowers.
Come their first year, many of the flowers that germinate won’t bloom. But soon the site will be brimming with Cuckoo Flowers, Pignuts, Beaked Hawksbeards, Eyebrights, Meadow Buttercup, and Yellow Rattles (among others). And as it’s a perennial wildflower mix we’re using, the fields will blossom year after year. They’ll keep coming back, and the bees will know exactly where to get their favourite summer feast.
In order for the meadow to really get going and spring up unhindered, soil fertility must stay low. It may sound counterintuitive, but otherwise nettles, docks and thistles will take over before the wildflowers get a chance to bud. Later in the summer we’ll pop in to cut back the unwelcome species, and will make a point of removing the cut material so it doesn’t inadvertently enrich the soil, or reroot. The clever-old Yellow Rattles are particularly handy when it comes to keeping unwanted grasses at bay; these golden sentinels sap the grasses of their nutrients, so the flowers can get on with their flowering.
Generally, Yellow Rattle is best sown in Autumn, but since we were keen to get the meadow underway we’ve lumped them in with the rest, and may well come back to plant more of our when leaves begin to fall.
Once the flowers are in bloom, the work we’ve done here will not only amount to a cornucopia for the local bee population - as well as other forms of wildlife - one day it’ll lend its seeds for more wildflower planting projects in the future.
And so, the cycle continues. For now, though, we wait.
