News & Views

Here are 5 key components to achieving the right effect:

1. Ensuring an amenity grass margin: Presentation is everything:

Imagine if the wild flower meadow went right to the edge: the residents would have complained that someone forgot to mow the grass! The amenity grass strip provides a frame of reference that demonstrates that the wild bit is deliberate. Then residents don’t complain and actually like it.

2. Right Spec’: Our JBA spec’ ensures a vital fallowing period is built into the process. All soil has in excess of 50 years of dormant viable seed in it, waiting for the trigger: that is disturbance. This is mostly seed you don’t want: Fat hen, hoary ox-tongue, sow-thistle, creeping thistle etc. Cultivate, then fallow it to allow this junk to germinate. Then kill it off. Then you have a sterile soil base for the wild flower. Often everyone wants to short-cut this: because they like a quick fix. You can’t beat the science. You need a sterile soil for new wild flower meadow to survive.

3. Right method: Any banks need hydroseeding, as this provides a wet gel, that helps enable rapid germination and establishment of the wildflower seed. Banks are invariably dry, and should be seeded with a dry meadow mix.

4. As for the base, the bottom can be seeded with a wet wildflower mix. The fallowing method, as advised above, applies here too.

5. The margins of the regular wet base level can be planted with marginal Vegetation, which should be especially thickly planted near the inlet Pipe, so this marginal vegetation is kept damp and helps to settle out silt in one place, and avoid silt building up on the base – reducing capacity.