This page will chronicle the creation of a wildflower area throughout the year. You are also welcome to visit the page that shows pictures throughout the year of one of our established wildflower areas.

You are welcome visit our wildflower "how to" page for more info on growing wildflowers.We love these areas and decided to use the ugly strip along the front of our road to create one in.

Once it is established, we intend to put up a sign saying "Please Pick and Enjoy" so that people walking along our street can have some flowers. This is also a great way to keep such an area healthy.

This area consists of some of the worst dirt imaginable .. hard, full of rocks, etc. We added no new dirt what so ever, just to see how these would grow in these conditions. Size is approximately 200 ft long by 5-6 ft wide.

April 16th, 1998 ..

• Art sprayed the front with Roundup and then, using a string trimmer, cleared away all of the dead material.
• Then using a rake, he "scruffed" up the so called "dirt".
• Spread the seed mix DO NOT COVER WITH DIRT and then watered VERY LIGHTLY
• Using our rider mower, rode back and forth to pack the seeds into the soil .. the light moistening helps pack them it
• spread a VERY LIGHT covering of straw over the area to prevent washoff
• Now thoroughly watered the entire area
• no fertilizer of any kind was used

MAY 12th .. 4 weeks later .. In the past 4 weeks we've had rain every week so no watering was required. If we hadn't had rain, we'd have watered every 5-6 days or so.

Now the area looks like this. You can see hundreds of flowers starting. They range from 2-5" tall at this point.

June 6th .. 8 weeks after planting.. OUR FIRST FLOWER .. In the past 4 weeks we have only had to water once since we've had rain about every 10 days or so. This is still a critical time to keep the ground moist. It looks like the first plants to bloom with be the cosmos like this one. Many of the plants are now 6-8" tall

June 18th ...In the past two weeks the cosmos have really started gaining height and the following have just started poking their heads out. Had rain once in the last 2 weeks so no watering was done. Grass started appearing in the bed so we used a 75% diluted mixture of Post .. this goes after grass and not the flowers. Also found some poison ivy starting, wiped the leaves of it with a Roundup soaked sponge on the end of a stick.

Sunday, August 02, 1998 .. well the dog days of July and August are upon us .. sparse rain and lots of heat. One of the wonderful things about wildflowers is that, once established, you really don't have to take care of them. As you can see, our road frontage is now bordered with wonderfully soft foliage and lots of color. We encourage those that walk along our street to "pick a flower and have a nice day".

Sunday August 20th, 1998 ... the late season yellows and blues are coming out. The only maintenance that we have done for this area is to pour ourselves a glass of wine and in the evening, we stroll along the bed and dead head the flowers, causing more to grow. We pull weeds ( at a leisurely rate ) as we feel like it. NOTE: we have only watered these plants twice since the intial starting of the bed, even thru the dry months of July and August .... gosh we wish all flowers were this easy !!!

Come back in a couple of weeks to see the next installment

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