Wild flower garden

Indeed - do not bother with the topsoil - the rougher the better with wild flowers.

Not too much topsoil. Lots of wildflowers prefer poor soils?

I have a small amount of unused garden behind my little fence and I’m thinking turning that into wildflower needs a bit of work though… Thinking I need to rake it over, cut back all the brambles then add some sort of topsoil, looks like it will be quite a big job but worth it

You’ll probably find you need to do a bit of culling in the Spring. If you allow a lot of the perennials to survive they choke the annuals and after a couple of years you will only have the most dominant plants.

I know this from experience ?

Thanks for the advice - I will wait and see!

We have lots of cosmos seeds coming up. I hope that they will survive the winter. They’ve self seeded.

Here's my little wildflower meadow in July this year. It was only tiny but attracted pollinators from dawn until beyond dusk. So much pleasure from one seed packet.

If you sowed a mix of annual and perennial seed what you could be seeing now are the perennial seeds germinating into little plants. They will set up a store of energy in their roots now, the leaves will die back a bit over winter and then the plant will use the stored energy to romp away in spring.

You could also be seeing germinating annual seeds which have fallen and been encouraged to thrive by the warm autumn. They might die back and not come again or just plod on quietly through a mild winter. Either way, don't worry, there will be thousands of other seeds waiting to germinate in spring I bet you.

You can always add more seed to enrich the mix of plants in your meadow. Yellow rattle is always a good seed to add as it keeps grass at bay.

Hope this is helpful.

Yes - had to get all the grass taken up. It is a new-build house so there was just rubble underneath which clearly suited the wild flowers. Good luck with yours - it was a joy all summer.

I can't give you any advice Luckygirl but well done! It sounds fabulous and the pollinating insects must have loved it. I have a long, quite steep, bank above a waist high wall down the side of the bungalow and I'm hoping to do something similar. Because it is steep and very stony I won't dig it over. I strimmed it very close a few weeks ago and raked everything up. Now I pull as much grass as I can and make little holes for the seed I have been saving from around the garden, (corncockle, marigold, love in a mist, poppies, snapdragon etc.) Some of it is coming up already but I have plenty saved for spring. It is a bit of an experiment and will be a mixture of wildflowers and garden flowers.
Did you remove all the grass before you started, and what flowers have you put in?