Spring is the time for planting wildflower seeds. These little seeds can be direct sown from late March to early May. If you’re aiming for an annual flower garden, planting early will give you a head start on flowering.
Choose an area that already has plants growing in it, so you know it is not too damp or shady. Generally, flowers full sunshine, so aim for a spot that is open and bright. If your conditions are particularly dry, wet, or shady, look for our mixes packed with plants that grow well in these challenging conditions.
Get the ground ready. Remove existing large plants and weeds. Remove all grasses that are present, as they will compete with the flower seedlings. The seeds need to have some soil to nestle into, so break the ground up a little. Before you sow, mix the seeds half and half with clean, dry sand so that they’re easy to scatter. Perlite also works, and it’s white, so it allows you to see the seeded areas better.
Scatter the seeds over the soil, reserving about 15% so that you can use them to fill in gaps over the course of the season. After that, these low-maintenance flowers don’t need a lot of tending. If it’s dry, keep them damp. Before they grow tall, you will need to remove fast-growing weeds so that they don’t shade out the young plants. If you plant them in the right spot, wildflowers should self-sow for several years, creating a miniature meadow. Add more seed if the meadow looks patchy.
Learn more technical tips about How to Grow Wildflowers.
Wildflowers aren’t just pretty. Even if you’re a keen vegetable gardener, incorporating flowers in your garden helps bring in the pollinators, such as bees, butterflies, and even hummingbirds. Give them an organic and flower-rich garden to feast on, and they’ll visit your fruit and vegetable crops as well. Other insects such as hover-flies come to visit flowers as well: their larvae eat aphids, while the adults sip on nectar. Wildflower blends improve biodiversity, which is one of the signs of success in organic gardening.
Growing wildflowers in your garden adds diversity to your landscape, inviting in the birds, the bees, and the many animals that rely on these meadow flowers. Do you want to grow wildflowers where grazing deer are a problem? Plant our wonderful Deer Resistant Wildflower Mix.
