The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 12 of 21
A meadow takes two years
All chapters
- A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
- Reading a bloom window
- Where the year sags
- The gap is worth more than the peak
- Nectar plants and pollen plants
- Willow, the first pollen
- Phacelia, six weeks from seed
- Borage
- Sowing for a date
- A strip sown too late
- White clover in the grass
- A meadow takes two years
- Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
- Heather, the gap's own honey
- Fruit trees and the years before blossom
- A lime tree for the next keeper
- Black locust
- Ivy on the fence
- Nothing to water, nothing dies
- What a planting can name on the jar
- Siting the hive matters more
A sown wildflower meadow looks like a failure for its whole first year. The annual weeds come up first and fastest, and the right thing to do is mow them before they seed and pull the docks, thistles and nettles by hand. Underneath, many perennials have germinated and are putting two to three times as much growth into their roots as shows above ground.
Most of them flower in the second or third year. From then on a meadow flowers for most of the season, one species after another, and needs little more than a cut once the flowers are over.
A meadow is patience bought once. In this game it flowers from two years after sowing, lightly the first time, then from late April for about half the year, every year, for good.