Making a Meadow
As high-summer approaches, you may be hating already the work needed to keep your lawn suburban-green in July and August. Or you might be worrying that your spring-lush field could soon morph into tinder-dry wildfire spot. One way to avoid these unwanted feelings and futures is to convert such spaces into native meadow.
Despite what some think, meadows don’t arise when fields are allowed to “revert to nature.” (No such process just happens.) In fact, since time immemorial, the Island’s meadows have been created and managed, first by indigenous peoples and then by landowners or organizations. They result from the conversion of forestland or, in current times, post-agricultural fields into open, native-plant-filled spaces.
Fun historical irony: Island places like the abandoned ag field in Paradise Valley currently being turned into meadow were, for millennia, um, meadow. Indigenous people opened and maintained these spaces by controlled forest-burning, to hunt and gather there. European-American settlers turned the meadows into fields. Now it’s back to the future.
As longstanding but now-rare Island features, meadows provide habitat for native plants, insect pollinators, birds, and small mammals. Turning field into meadow repairs soil damaged by row-cropping and livestock during the Island’s agricultural period.
Though not easy to get started, meadows really pay off long-term with their low maintenance and surprising beauty. Here’s one way to begin meadow-making this summer:
Select a small patch of vegetation and sheet-mulch it with cardboard to kill off what’s growing there. Meadow-making best begins with a blank slate.
In the fall, remove the cardboard and any plants beneath that are still alive. Sow the now-bare soil with seeds of annual meadow plants, purchased from one of many PNW native-seed providers. Don’t rake in or cover the seeds with soil. Just gently water the planting area or roll it with a lawn roller.
At the same time, or in the spring if you don’t have a warm place to grow plants over winter, purchase the seed of perennial native meadow plants and sow them in pots. (They don’t do well if direct-seeded like annuals.) Grow them out until they’ve got some true leaves and seem hardy, then plant them into your patch of ground as temps allow.
Irrigate as needed through the first summer. Remove any non-native invasives by hand.
Keep up your spirits. Your efforts may be disappointing at first. Native-plant seeds are often small and hard to distribute evenly as you sow, resulting in some bare patches. Some seeds take more time to sprout than you’d expect. Perennial natives can take a long time to grow big and full.
Good hack: If you’re willing to give up dreams of a wildflower-packed meadow, include a lot of native-grass seed when you do your fall sowing. The result will be a lusher and more natural-looking meadow.
Meadow-making is more vocation than vacation. But weighed against all the time and work of years maintaining lawn or ornamental beds? Definitely easier, and a better legacy to leave behind.
