Why you shouldn’t mix Grass and Perennial Wildflower Seed

In nature we see grasses and wildflowers growing side by side. It looks great and is great as the compatible roots systems can create dense coverage that helps to prevent weed seed from germinating. Often the plan is to seed a large area with grasses and wildflower seeds to create a naturalized meadow which is also a great idea, but unfortunately nothing is ever really that simple. Creating a naturalized meadow will take several years and you will want to find ways to keep the maintenance simple.

Grass seed will germinate pretty uniformly and within a period of time that is counted in weeks as opposed to sometimes years like perennial seed.  But before you see your first blade of grass you will see the annual weeds begin to geminate. This is natural succession; the soil is full of seeds but it’s not what you were hoping for and of course you will want to do something about this before the weeds make more seed the situation completely explodes. Now just imagine you have wildflower seeds mixed in, do you know the difference between weed and wildflower seedlings? Don’t feel bad, not too many people do and there is another way to approach this.

We recommend planting wildflower islands in the space while seeding the larger area to grass. This approach allows you to give extra care and hand weed the area with the wildflowers while being able to mow the grass area before the annual weeds can set seed.  As they are annual weeds they only live one year, so as long as you keep it mowed the surface will eventually start to calm down and the grasses will begin to fill in. There will be perennial weeds too that will need more attention but there will be less of those.

Eventually the wildflowers will begin to spread out of the island(s) and you will want to stop mowing in those areas as the wildflowers will not tolerate being mowed. To learn more about this concept Click Here. We do sell one grass mix that comes with wildflower seed but the seeds are packaged separately so you can choose to employ the above mentioned concept. This is the Short Grass Wildflower Meadow Mix and it covers 375 sq. ft. which is a small enough space that one could hand weed the area if you chose to seed the grass and wildflowers together; anything larger than that would be over-whelming in our experience.