Before you fill in the mail-order form for wildflower seeds or drive to your local garden centre for them, take some time to prepare the site for planting. As with any other garden, you need to have a plan of some kind. If you are unsure about your design abilities, talk to a landscape designer at you favourite garden centre. My book Canadian Garden Design has some suggestions and plans for a meadow garden as well as many other styles that can be adapted to use native plants.
- Remove turf from the area. Either remove the grass form the proposed planting area manually with a sharp spade, cover with black plastic for 4 or more weeks after daytime temperatures rise above 70°F (21°C), or spray with Wipe Out, an environmentally friendly non-selective week and grass killer. Note those words "non-selective" and the name- it isn't selective in what it wipes out. If it touches it, it will kill it!
- Turn the soil over. Cultivate the planting area with a rototiller or manually with a spade or shovel, turning the soil several times to loosen it.
- Spread a 2 to 3 in. (5 to 7.5 cm) layer of finished compost or composted cattle or steer manure over the entire planting area. The idea is to build up the organic content of the soil as generously as you can. If your soil is heavy and clay-like, double the amount of compost. Turn the compost in with the existing soil.
- Rake smooth. Using a hard rake or garden rake break up any clods of earth and smooth out the surface for planting. Now you are ready.
If you are sowing seed, do so by hand, allowing the seed mixture to roll off your forefinger as you wave your arm back and forth over the planting area. Rake smooth, using the back of the rake, and water thoroughly. Keep consistently wet for 4 to 6 weeks after sowing. In sunny weather, this usually means watering every day. Reduce watering frequency as the plants become well established, then stop watering except in severe drought.
| Garden Maintenance |
A native plant garden is not a non-maintenance garden. You have to maintain it, otherwise many invasive non-native species will take over. Primarily, this means judicious weeding out of unwanted plants as they appear. The best advice I can give you is to keep on top of this job in May, June and early July, before the "weeds" have put down a substantial root. If you wait until mid-summer to do it, you will have a huge job on your hands.
If you are establishing a native plant garden, you probably do not want to use these fertilizers. However, it does pay to apply a least a 2 1/2 in. (6.25 cm) layer of compost to the planted area every spring as a natural fertilizer.
