Wildflower meadow management, end of summer cut…

Last week we carried out the cutting back of the wildflower meadow we manage, in a North Norfolk village. This job brings the feeling of the end of summer, cutting back all the growth and raking it away – preparing the land for early autumn seed germination, and tidying up before bad weather. This is an always a very pleasurable job to do; it feels so seasonal and timeless, raking the cut grass and flowers up into hay piles. It is also a very physical job – trying to rake out as much of the dead grass as possible. You then have the satisfaction at the end of the day – clear open space again, seeing the orchard trees and nut producing shrubs we have planted here, and a trailer full looking like a haystack.

We have been managing this area in order to encourage it into a wildflower meadow over around five years, when we started it was a lawn, and not that long before it was a lawn, it was an arable field. We began the meadow process by rotavating the grass to a point where half of the grass was kept and the other half was bare soil, and removed all the turfy chunks that the rotavator had cut from the grass. We then seeded this with a wildflower only mix (no grass), combined with planting 9cm pots of some wildflower species too, and have been managing along the way to encourage more wildflowers year on year.

The meadow cut is not just for the visual look, the main reason we do the cut now is to encourage more wildflowers in the following years. At this point in the season, the wildflowers have all dried out and so have their seed heads. Some of these seeds will have already set and germinated, some not. The cut and raking process allows for the last of these to drop down and be shaken down to the ground through the day, these will then hopefully set themselves and grow as wildflowers next year. We are also removing nutrient from the soil with this process. By cutting the summer growth back before it has the chance to rot down over winter, we are taking all that nutrient in the grass out of the system, and as wildflowers generally prefer low nutrient soil, and grasses generally prefer high nutrient, this should lead to less grass competing against the wildflowers. We cut the grass down to a height of around 4-6 inches, this allows some length and cover for wildlife such as the many frogs living in here, and avoids cutting the newly germinated species. We also keep some areas long and totally unmanaged, which are slowly supporting larger scrub species, and this keeps some longer cover and habitat year round for animals. The hay we take from the meadow goes off to a farm green waste facility not far down the road, where it will be turned to compost available to be sold to the public.

As far as the wildflower meadow management goes, this is pretty much it for the year. During spring and summer we may clear some space around the fruit trees to avoid competition with the grass, and there are pathways to be mown, but that’s about it! In previous years we did some weeding of unwanted species, but by catching these before they self seed stops the majority coming back and soon the weeding is unneeded. In earlier years we would also add more wildflower seed at this time of year, including the semi-parasitic yellow rattle, which suppresses the grass species further – but this doesn’t seem necessary now.

Get in touch if you’re interested in meadow management, or if you have a space you would like to turn into a wildflower meadow through our contact form.