Plant Wildflowers This Fall — Your Bees Will Thank You
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One of the benefits of gardening in the PNW is that fall gives us another planting season.
By late summer, the sun is a little less intense, the mornings are cooler, and eventually, the rain comes back. While most of us are thinking about cleaning up the garden rather than planting more of it, fall is actually a great time to sow wildflower seeds.
And in some cases, it’s better than spring.
Why plant wildflowers in the fall?
Wildflowers have been doing this without our help forever. Flowers bloom, seeds drop to the ground, winter happens, and when the conditions are right, those seeds get to work.
Many perennial wildflowers actually benefit from spending the winter outside in cold, damp soil. This process is called cold stratification, and it helps break the seed’s natural dormancy so it’s ready to germinate when things warm up in the spring.
Here in the PNW, fall planting has another obvious advantage: rain.
Once our regular fall rain returns, Mother Nature can take over a good portion of the watering duties. I’m always a fan of letting her do some of the work.
Our Bee Wildflower Mix
If you want a pollinator garden but don't particularly want to stand in front of the seed rack choosing 18 different packets, this is the easy way to do it.
Our Bee Wildflower Seed Mix is a mix of annual and perennial flowers selected to provide food and habitat for bees and other pollinators. It can be planted in spring or fall and includes:
Chinese forget-me-not, Siberian wallflower, purple coneflower, corn poppy, blue flax, lance-leaved coreopsis, China aster, California poppy, baby blue-eyes, Indian blanket, globe gilia, plains coreopsis, sweet alyssum, lavender hyssop, New England aster, bergamot, fleabane daisy and tidy-tips.
That’s a lot of flowers from one bag of seed.
When should you plant it?
For fall sowing, the trick is not planting too early.
You don't want a stretch of warm weather convincing your seeds that it's spring, only to have the young seedlings get clobbered when winter arrives.
Wait until temperatures have cooled and we're moving into consistently cooler fall weather. The goal is for the seeds to settle into the soil, spend the winter there, and germinate when conditions are right in spring.
Don't just throw it on the lawn
I know. They're wildflowers. It seems like throwing seeds around should be sufficient.
You'll get much better results with a little preparation.
Choose a sunny area and remove as much grass and weed competition as you can. You want the seed to actually make contact with the soil. Scatter your seed and lightly rake or press it into the surface rather than burying it deeply.
If the rain hasn't arrived yet, keep the area moist while everything settles in.
Then leave it alone.
It won't look like much during the winter. That's exactly what it's supposed to look like.
And maybe don't clean up quite so much
While you're creating habitat for pollinators, resist the urge to make every inch of the garden perfectly tidy.
Many native bees nest in the ground, and other beneficial insects overwinter in hollow stems, leaves and plant debris. Leaving some bare soil and allowing parts of the garden to stay a little messy over winter can be surprisingly helpful.
This is one gardening chore I'm perfectly happy to recommend not doing.
Plant some seeds, let winter do its thing, and come spring you'll have a head start on flowers for both you and the bees.
Pick up locally in our store or buy it in our online store with link below.