The wildflower ribbon bed’s first summer
(top) Detail of a section of wildflower drifts in one ribbon bed, late summer 2010.
Although it was a difficult season due to patchy rainfall and some very hot weather, the plug plants did very much better than anticipated despite only being watered twice.
This was because they’d been heavily mulched with the debris from grasses etc that had been cleared from the beds.
Also the grass stems bent over the young plants had created a lightly shaded relatively humid micro-climate. We also noticed that after a clear night dew condensed on the grass stems and ran down or dripped onto the plants below. FogQuest uses a similar principal in the Andes to capture fog and condense it into drinking water.
(centre and bottom) The first cut of the meadow in October 2010 clearly shows how the grasses had bent over the ribbon beds. Somewhat to our surprise most of the grasses had not rooted into the the beds.
In Autumn 2010 we decided to make more ribbon beds through the rest of the meadow.
