Wildflower Planting Begins!

This past week we started putting in some of the 400 plants that are waiting in their little plug containers. After Steve's bed prep, the laying out of beds was easy peasy!

As part of the OEFFA summer farm series, we visited Sunny Meadows Flower Farm and discovered the path mat pictured below. No, it's not petroleum free, but it does have a 20 year guarantee. That's awesome! With just the two of us managing this farm, we need all the time saving measures we can find and we've found weeding and mowing paths simply does not fit into our schedules!

We also purchased a biodegradeable weed mat from a company in Colorado. This mat is made of paper and should last a good three months before it starts to degrade. That will give the plants some time to get established and will give us some time to get a good mulch laid, all while keeping any undesired plants from growing.

Once we finally got all the path and weed mat laid, planting began! This zone is very close the road so we put purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) on the leading edge. We also planted butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa), some wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium) and royal catchfly (Silene regia). It will be stunning!

It felt quite satisfying to see a whole row of baby plants tucked securely into the soil!

Big Bertha, one of Steve's hand augers from his soil consulting days, helped us bore these holes in a jiffy. We LOVE this tool.

All this wildflower prepping and planting has left the vegetable garden a bit neglected this summer. It's weedier than normal, but we are harvesting lots of greens, cucumbers, zucchini, peas (still!) and a few cherry tomatoes here and there. We are quite cool in Ohio this summer so our tomatoes are slow going. We will see what happens this month! We plan to get some photos this week to share on our blog. It's our first year growing breadseed poppies and we are both wowed by these plants and think you will be too, if you aren't already!