Facts: Build your own summer meadow
A meadow can be any size or small. Leave the front of the garden or a corner of the cultivation plot wild.
Remember to choose a sunny place, preferably with lean soil. Those who have clay soil can add a little sand before flower seeds are sown, because meadow plants are adapted to nutrient-poor conditions and thrive best then.
Mow the meadow once a year – then you benefit the diversity and make it easier for seeds to germinate.
Collect seeds locally in your area and sow them in the fall. Or buy seed mixture in the spring.
If you want to invest in special elements, you can plant seedlings with, for example, king mint, thyme, butter balls and a large bluebell.
Choose plants that occur in the nature that surrounds you, and you will benefit local pollinators.
– Let it be a little messy!
Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen, research assistant at SLU Råd Nu, which is part of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, stands in the middle of the flower meadow in Kivik.
Here poppies bloom in a cloak with cornflowers. Grown grass sways in the wind and white clover spreads with the field wind in the undergrowth.
– There comes a honsung bee in the cornflowers, Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen suddenly shouts.
Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen, research assistant at SLU Råd Nu, among the cornflowers in the utility zoo at Kiviks Musteri.
TT is visiting the utilitarian zoo that has been created at Kivik’s temple in Skåne in collaboration with Lund University, SLU and the National Organization of Leisure Cultivation.
Here, the researchers will improve and study the presence of useful animals in the nature-inspired plantation with elements of rock sections and old hollow stumps.
“It’s simple stuff”
The idea is that even ordinary visitors should get tips and ideas to take home to their own garden, says gardener Caroline Stenkilsson.
– What you find here you can mostly find at a nursery, she says and points to a planting.
– It’s simple things like love herb and butterfly bushes.
Ordinary garden owners can in fact help to increase the biological diversity in the cultivated landscape, thinks the gardener who has let stately daylilies mingle with laid out stumps in a slightly wild arrangement.
Caroline Stenkilsson, gardener, in her planting with stumps.
– For bees, which can build their nests in stump cavities, Caroline Stenkilsson explains.
– Our wild bees must have somewhere to go, because when we clean our gardens, they have nowhere to go.
Collect local seeds
The way to a natural garden can also be to pull down on the lawn and simply let in the wild. Think about diversity and flowering over a long period of time, from early spring to late autumn.
A tip is to collect seeds of wild flowers somewhere nearby and let them germinate in their own plantings.
– Then you want local seeds from a local place, to support the local farm animals, Lotta Fabricius Kristiansen emphasizes.
Arranged meets the more wild. Plants about to establish themselves in the Utility Zoo.
TT: Is the trend of golf course-cut lawn, a well-groomed rhododendron and a single geranium in a pot over?
– I think so … It’s monoculture and we do not want it anywhere. We want a great variety. Let go of the wild, she says and points out over the meadow again:
– There comes a nice bumblebee!