Meadow Making
Introduction for meadow making.
Starting Out
Study your site
The first step to meadow making is to look closely at your site. What you see will guide your site preparation and which plants you choose for your project. Is the area sunny or shady? How wet is the site in the spring and how dry is it in the summer? Notice slopes at your site. Steep slope areas will be drier, while swales will pool the moisture.
Look at the current vegetation and try to identify the plants. Are there some natives? What non-native plants are there currently? A variety of plants will indicate healthy soil. Is the soil dark and full of humus or is it a light in color with a dusty texture? Has the soil been compacted from foot traffic or house construction?
Many areas of the San Juan Islands are rocky with thin soils. Rocky areas can be filled with wildflowers but will need some special attention.
Understanding these factors will help you to prep your site and select the plants for your meadow.
Identify your goals
Now it's time to think about why you want a meadowscape. What do you want your meadow to accomplish? In the end, how will you evaluate its success?
Native plant meadows, just like traditional gardens, can accomplish different goals and have varying areas of focus. Perhaps you are interested in supporting pollinators or recreating a pre-contact landscape. Or perhaps you want to increase biodiversity. Is there a rare or endangered insect, butterfly, or bird that you want to create habitat for? Meadow wildflowers and grasses can also improve water retention and drainage. Along with these goals, how wild can your meadow be? Does your site need to be tidy to conform with the neighborhood?
Make a plan
Now that you understand your site and your goals, it is time to make a rough plan. Scoping your project to ensure you have the resources such as time, plants, and funds available is key to being successful. Let’s start to pencil this out.
How big should you make your meadow? Erring on the side of a smaller site will keep it manageable, especially starting out. You will learn a lot with your first meadow efforts and can then expand the meadow in following years.
If your site is predominantly non-natives, you will need to first clear the existing plants. A method I recommend in creating your meadowscape is to smother the non-native vegetation with cardboard and chips, then planting with a combination of plugs and seed. For a 10’x10’ sized meadow site, a quick rule of thumb is 100 square feet of cardboard, 2 cubic yards of mulch, 125 plant plugs, and five seed packets are needed. A 20’x20’ site (400 sq feet) would require four times these amounts.
Consider how you will provide plants for your project. Many native plant nurseries will provide plugs for restoration projects which are generally less expensive than pots and faster to plant. In San Juan County, our Landbank grows plugs for private landowners and is a great resource. Contact them to discuss your project to ensure they have capacity to support your project. Many species need to be ordered in late summer for delivery the following year. Another option is to purchase seed and grow your own plugs. Growing native plants is very rewarding, but does require extra time and dedication.
Prepare Your Site
Preparing your site for planting is very important in creating your meadow, as good preparation will reduce weeding and maintenance and help your plantings survive . There are various methods of site preparation and your site characteristics, existing vegetation, and financial and time budgets will help you to determine the best method for your project. There is a lot of information existing on site preparation. See the resources tab for my website recommendations. Below, I will review the steps I took for my site preparation and what I learned along the way.
Our restoration project consisted of two distinct areas: a remnant rocky bald coastal meadow and a lawn. The coastal meadow was mostly European grasses and weeds, but within the grass were many native wildflowers, grasses, shrubs, mosses and lichens which I definitely wanted to preserve. The lawn area was mostly tall fescue, a popular European lawn grass, with very little native vegetation.
Lawn Area Preparation
To prepare the lawn area, I chose to smother the European grass with cardboard, topped with 6” of wood chips. Initially, I decided to start with a 20’ x 20’ test area to see if the cardboard and chip layering would smother out the tall fescue grass. In early spring, I cut the tall fescue grass down to the soil level, then laid down the cardboard, overlapping the cardboard edges by 6” to ensure full coverage. Then I topped the cardboard with the wood chips.
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As the cardboard decomposed, some grass shoots would grow through the chips, but these were easy to pull. My lawn site was fairly wet, so by the fall, the area was ready to begin planting. In the dryer areas, the cardboard and chips decomposed more slowly, so planting was delayed until the following spring.
Remnant Meadow Preparation
Preparing the remnant meadow areas was more challenging than preparing the lawn area because there were amazing native grasses and wildflowers intermixed with the weeds. Overall for my project, the shoreline remnant meadow has taken more time upfront to prepare than the lawn area, but the restoration effort has been more successful and rewarding in the long term.
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To restore a remnant meadow, I needed to weed out or otherwise remove the introduced species. The first challenge for me was to identify the native from introduced plants. The mobile app, Inaturalist, was a good tool to identify the native plants. I took photos and created a native plant list for the property that helped me to learn the plants growing at me site.
I also asked for help from our local botanist at Kwiaht, Madrona Murphy. There will be native plant enthusiasts in your area garden club or Native Plant Society that know your vegetation and can help you learn. Pull only the plants you are certain are weeds or introduced species that you want to eliminate. If in doubt, leave it.
Winter and early spring are the best times to weed, but it is also the time when many native plant seedlings such as camas and harvest brodiaeas are easily confused with a blade of grass. The harvest brodiaea will have round cylinder blades, whereas grass will have flat blades.
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Grass will also come out with a gentle pull, whereas the brodiaeas and camas will not easily be removed.
(brodiaea photo)
Shrub and tree encroachment is a threat to our meadows and our site was. On my site, the nootka rose, snowberry, and oregon grape, had created a thicket which outcompeted any wildflowers and native grasses. Prior to European settlement, the people would regularly burn the meadows to remove the douglas fir and shrub encroachment and promote the wildflower meadows which were a major food source.
(thicket photo)
Given the large number of homes nearby, fire is no longer an option here for controlling the shrubs. To remove the 6’ tall nootka rose thicket, I hired our local arborist, Zack Blomberg of Flower Mountain Tree Services, to mow the rose bushes with a mulch mower. This reduced the shrub mass which was mulched and left to decompose. The shrubs sprouted the following spring, at which time I cut the stems at ground level and dabbed with glyphosate.
(A remnant meadow where Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum) is being overtaken by ripgut brome (bromus diandrus).
Planting
Ideas for planting
Maintenance
Stuff here about maintenance.
Stuff here about maintenance.