Hand Collected Meadow Seed Mixes

Meadow seed mixes come in several forms, but it had never struck me that hand collected mixes might be one of them. There are generally four types of meadow seed mixes; let's call them generic, bespoke, direct harvest and green hay. Generic meadow seed mixes are usually 80% grasses 20% wildflowers. They consist of seed harvested from plants usually grown in controlled environments, so that you can guarantee their exact composition. They consist of a limited number of common species but can provide a really good starting point to establish a meadow. This has obvious advantages; you know exactly what you're getting and the seed mix should be pretty much bombproof. This approach can also be used to create bespoke mixes, which produce different visual or ecological results. You can create blue mixes or mixes for particular butterflies, for example. We're big fans of direct harvest mixes. These are seed mixes which you collect and clean from existing wildflower meadows. If produced carefully they provide a wide range of species with high floristic content - usually something like 50% wildflowers to 50% meadow grasses. They also have a specific geographic origin. This is important for many reasons; viability, local ecosystem, persistence, local distinctiveness. We've even set up a website promoting them. I've also come across green hay, which sounds alluring but actually... isn't. The idea is straightforward; take a hay cut from an existing meadow, collect the hay, strew the hay over the target site, remove. What could possibly go wrong? Well, actually, a lot. The logistics of this sort of operation are horrendous, as you can imagine. And hay from the donor site is only going to contain a small % of the species there, most of which won't have set seed at the right moment. It's also very difficult to find the right donor site. Hand collected seed mixes were something new for me. Their advantages are obvious. Good and specific species representation, as they're collected across a wide time window and combined after cleaning. Specific provenance. High floristic content. What's not to like? Well, potentially, the cost! As you can imagine, per kg these mixes are much, much more expensive than their competition. Here's an odd thing, though. I'm writing from deepest Norfolk, where I've just been learning about what the folk at Abbey Farm in Flitcham have been up to. A dedicated team of harvesters has been hard at work collecting and processing seed for a large local project. It's taking a while, as you can imagine, but the important thing is that it's doable. Fantastic. There are simply fabulous wildflower meadows at the farm which supply most of their needs, and painstaking research gives them an appropriate species list. I do have a reservation, though. This is an unbeatable approach if you have a wonderful source of seeds (which Abbey Farm is) and either deep pockets or very poor fertility soil. Let me explain. It's obviously very labour intensive to hand pick individual seeds, clean them manually and combine them into a mix. Consequently, it's expensive - very expensive. Having said that, the recommended seeding rate is the lowest I have ever seen - by factors. You seed "normal" meadow seed mixes at 3 to 4g per square metre, which seems ludicrously little to most people. These hand picked mixes are recommended to be sown at 0.5g. 0.5g! Even allowing for the very high proportion of wildflowers, this is very low. This rate means on a per square metre basis the different types of mixes are similar prices. On any medium to high fertility soil this will be asking for trouble, however, as it will be rapidly overwhelmed by docks, thistles, and nettle - among other nasties. So if you have a top donor site nearby and very low fertility soil or deep pockets, this is a great option...