Harvested Meadow Seed

In the late Neolithic when I started selling wildflower seed there weren't many options for buying seed for your meadow. How times have changed. 

Before I get onto that, let's be clear. We're talking about traditional wildflower meadows here. What my Ag Lab forebears would know as hay meadows. Not "pictorial meadows", or "meadows" with lots of annual wildflowers. Traditional meadows, or "unimproved grassland", consist of grasses and wildflowers, which are almost all perennial.

And we're talking about wildflower seed - not (much) cheaper agricultural cultivars of wildflower species. 

Constructed Mixes

There's a range of off the shelf wildflower and grass mixes available to create meadows from scratch. They're  constructed from predetermined %s of wildflowers and grasses, and are still available today. Usually 20% wildflowers - sometimes less - and 80% grasses, they're put together to provide a good starting point for a new meadow, and usually relate to different soil types.

The only people who offer wild grasses in mixes like this are Emorsgate Seeds. For everyone else they're "certified" - i.e. cultivars. There isn't the money in it to grow grasses just for their seed - yet - so we must make do. The cultivars used might be selected more or less randomly, so that can potentially be a problem. 

The wildflower element of these mixes is usually harvested from a plot given over to one particular species. The seed originally used to establish those plants would - hopefully - have been taken from a wild population. Yellow Rattle is a notable exception; it has to be harvested from existing grassland.

Harvested Mixes

Supply of constructed mixes has been outstripped by demand recently, not least because the drought reduced this year's harvest. That's highlighted a rapidly growing segment of the wildflower meadow seed market - mixes harvested from donor meadows by brush harvester or combine.

Photo: Heritage Seeds

These mixes have always been around, and widely used for local projects. Only recently though have they become more widely available. Why have they been slow to catch on?

• They're typically only produced in small volumes by small producers. 
• They're usually not reliably available year after year, as sites are only harvested sustainably.
• The make up of the mixes varies over time, as you can imagine.
• Processing quality can vary between the super professional and super basic. There can be very little chaff in the mix or half a forest, for example. Viability will suffer if seed is allowed to overheat or humidity levels aren't carefully controlled. 
• The quality of the mixes also varies according to the quality of the donor site and how well it's harvested.   

All this makes them unattractive to larger seed merchants and retailers and difficult for landscape architects etc to specify. 

By way of contrast we've promoted them from the get go, for a number of reasons:

• They're incredibly floral, as they're harvested from really good quality meadow sites. Forget 15 species of 20% wildflowers - you can get over 40 species in a mix which is 70% wildflowers! Nitrogen deposition and warmer winters - encouraging coarse grasses - mean we now look for higher %s of wildflowers in a mix. 
• The grasses are wild, of course, and - again - much more varied.
• Arguably, they are more suited to local conditions. At any rate, they are more genetically diverse than seed produced commercially.
• How lovely too to support landowners and farmers establishing wildflower meadows.  It's a very pleasant surprise for them to discover they have a really nice cash crop at the end of the process. 
• And here's the biggie - cost to the customer. In the current market, if I were to try to replicate a good quality harvested meadow mix a) I couldn't and b) Even an approximation with certified grasses would be something north of £300/kg ex VAT. We sell these mixes typically for between £60 and £130/kg - they tend to be more expensive for smaller producers. There hasn't been much change to these prices for 10 years. 

We have more and more of these mixes available - have a look at our retail seed website: www.BritishWildflowerMeadowSeeds.co.uk