The wildflowers seem to have sorted themselves out this year, with ox eye daisies, poppies and nigellas growing easily in the last metre of the garden. I allocated this metre to wildlife when I first started planning the veg patch, so that bees and other wildlife (including all those ladybirds I introduced) had somewhere lovely to live.
We also have aquilegias, poppies, foxgloves and other flowers growing around paths and other hidden away spaces, which I like to leave.
Of course, this also means that aphids can exist there, but I’m squishing them every day and they don’t seem to be spreading. Meanwhile, I’m encouraging their predators, so that’s feeling pretty good.
I saw a genius solution for wildflowers on Instagram earlier in the week, which is to have a metal grid above them, reasonably low to the ground but high enough to support, which the flowers grow through as they get taller. Hopefully, this will help them next time round as one of the big problems I’m facing is that the poppies sort of flop all over the place.
For now I’m managing them by dead heading to clear space (it can get quite congested) and trying to make sure things like the lupins and salvia, both of which I love, have enough to space to grow, too. I also have to work quite hard to stop the one metre becoming two!
Hopefully, the wildlife loves it!
Garden 101 