I live in the Kansas City area which is comfortably Zone 6 from my understanding.

We’ve recently purchased our first house and the yard work is super time consuming! With .5 acres just mowing alone takes like 2 hours with my push mower due to all the trees and hills in the yard. I would like to have a pollinator friendly yard while also not having to spend so much time mowing. Using less gas in general would also be neat.

What I am thinking of doing is prior to first snow fall, over-seed with wildflowers from American Medows for most of the yard, and then in areas with some foot traffic, plant a mixture of clover and native grasses and then only worry about mowing in that area periodically.

Has anybody else ever over seeded with wildflowers? A lot of stuff I see posted here (and formerly on reddit) seem to be a bunch of elegant but hard and time consuming work like ripping up the yard, putting cardboard and mulch down, and then planting over that. However, I don’t really have the time and money to do all that 🙁. Would I have desirable results with just over-seeding?

  • Track_Shovel
    link
    fedilink
    English
    101 year ago

    Don’t bother with mulching, and start small, with the size of an area you think you can handle.

    Peel back the sod, till up the topsoil a bit, and then seed with competitive wild flowers at a high rate.

  • @PutangInaMo
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    English
    41 year ago

    I’ll be establishing a meadow next year. You can always do the cardboard and wood chip method of you want, should make it easier and cleaner to start. But wildflowers usually grow a lot taller than grass and “weeds” so they’ll out compete them anyways.