Tired of mowing the lawn? Here’s a green alternative
Lawns hold a firm place in our hearts — and at our homes. They’re a source of neighbourhood pride for many. They frame gardens perfectly, they create great pathways and are the No. 1 choice for activity areas. In parks and sports clubs, stretches of grass are where everything outside has happened over the years.
Some people look at a swath of lawn and see a world of athletic potential: soccer fields and cricket pitches and baseball diamonds. We tend not to be an athletic family. Ben would tell you that his athletic career peaked with a soccer participation medal at age eight. Like father, like son.
Instead, we tend to frolic. And where better to frolic than in open meadows?
Stop amid a flowering meadow on a still day and you are sure to hear a chorus of happy birds and pollinators — many of which can be threatened species, hanging on by a thread in the margins of our overdeveloped urban landscape.
A mature meadow is virtually maintenance-free. A gardener occasionally steps in to knock down the most aggressive weeds, like sow thistle and Canada thistle. A few years after you sow or plant a meadow it will become a self-regulated habitat that evolves throughout the seasons.
The environmental benefits are many. A mature perennial meadow has an enormous root mass with benefits that are two-fold. First, they sequester and slow storm water. This helps to reduce erosion and hastens absorption during floods, as well as resilience during droughts. Second, carbon sequestration provides a huge environmental benefit. The amount of carbon-dioxide that plants sock away in the soil is hard to measure, but we know it is significant. The deeper and more active the roots, the more carbon stored below ground. How to establish your own meadow: There are two types of meadows: annual and perennial. An annual meadow will establish itself more quickly, offering colourful flowers in the first year. Meadow plants perform best in full sun.
A perennial meadow can take two or three years to mature but will replenish itself almost indefinitely, paying dividends for years to come. First, kill off weeds or grass in the designated area by solarizing the area with sixmillimetrethick, darkcoloured plastic. Pin down the tarp over the area for six to eight weeks to deprive the underlying lawn of light and oxygen, and to burn off any remnant weed seeds in the soil.
Once your soil is tilled, broadcast a quality seed mix: browse Ontario Seed Company’s selection or take a look at our own Mark’s Choice Bee and Pollinator Wildflower Mix.
OSC’s offerings include deerresistant wildflower mixes and a Flowering Ecological Lawn Mixture, which is pre-mixed with grasses such as sheep’s fescue and creeping red fescue. If you have chosen a flower mixture, blend in a grass mixture with fescues and perennial rye, often sold as “shade tolerant” lawn seed. Mix it all in a bucket and spread at a seeding rate of about one kilogram per 100 square metres (2.2 lbs./1,000 sq. ft.), rake it into the soil and water thoroughly.
A perennial meadow does well in poor, clay-based soils. A good way to develop your perennial meadow is by starting small and building it out incrementally over years. Now is a good time to buy perennials at garden retailers. Their early inventory right now is generally broader than you will find later in summer.
If you plan to sow a wildflower meadow, we recommend that you get the weeds under control before sowing the seeds. If you don’t, you’ll be pulling weeding and backfilling with wildflower seed mix or plants for the first few years until the meadow is dense and competitive with the weed population.
Dense and competitive — like a pair of frolickers you may know.