Converting the last scraps of turf at my house to a pollinator lawn -- the problems.

This is third and final installment of a series on converting the last vestiges of my lawn to a pollinator lawn. If you haven't yet, you might find it helpful to go back and read part 1 and part 2.

When you are finally at the point of seeding your pollinator lawn, you can do everything right but still have issues. I'll give you some tips on how to do the sowing right, and then I'll give you some thoughts on how to handle the (inevitable) mistakes.

Buy something to help you see where you've sown, but don't buy (or use) a spreader.

The company I bought from sold rice hulls which worked well. Vermiculite is another option but it's much more expensive.

Sowing by hand is best with a seed mix (as opposed to a single type of seed) because the seeds are all different sizes and shapes. Your hand will be the best tool to manage this.

Mix the hulls in with half of the seed you are going to use and spread it out walking left to right in paths across your lawn. Now, get the other half of the seeds, mix in the remaining hulls and then go front to back.

Actually, the direction you go in or which direction you do first isn't at all critical. What is critical is that you go 90 degrees to the first direction for your second pass.

Now want to gently rake in the seeds and/or cover them with a skim of dirt.

I did a little of both because I like to feed birds and having a ton of loose seed on the dirt is like putting out a giant buffet for my birds. I like watching them eat and hang around, but not this seed!

Just grab a bowl of loose topsoil and toss it out like you did with the seeds and hulls. Then flip the rake tines up and LIGHTLY (I emphasize it here because you do not want these seeds too deep) pass back and forth over the dirt.

The raking is a great time to even things out. Did you accidentally dump too much in one spot with a thin spot nearby? Tines down on the rake and gently pull some over.

Lastly, to help germination, lightly but firmly tamp the seeds down into the dirt. You can rent a roller, but I took some scrap lumber and some rope I had hanging around and made a tamper. Not the best, not the fastest, but the price was right.

Now you water and wait. I don't know about you, but there is something akin to magic in watching germination happen. The little seedlings come up, new plant life begins. You keep your fingers crossed that all will go right. And then it doesn't.

Don't misunderstand me. Mine was not a catastrophic failure. I actually consider myself pretty lucky that things went as well as they did. The picture below is a few weeks on from sowing. You can probably estimate the time elapsed by the height of the greens: in the tamping picture above that bed was empty.

Manage your expectations during this whole thing because starting a bee lawn is a process. No matter how careful you are, no matter how much you prepare, some part of this is luck. Take the attitude that you will do everything you can to give the new lawn its best shot at success, and then prepare to handle the inevitable problems.

I should say too that you should resist the temptation to let potential problems keep you from trying. Have faith that you will be able to fix the issues that come your way. I did. You can too.

If it helps, feel free to reach out: info@goodthingsfromcoryskitchenandyard.com

To the extent that it's helpful, I gathered up a list of notes and discoveries relating to problems while seeding my own pollinator lawn.

In no particular order ...

• One of the biggest lessons I had to learn was patience.

  • Looking back I think I wasted a lot of seed because I thought everything would pop all at the same time in the same spots.

  • I tossed out seed multiple times over the course of two or three weeks on the same ground after the beginning because I figured that every spot should germinate at the same rate.

  • This wasn't too painful, but it was time and it was money. If I had just waited a bit, the growth and germination would have caught up a little. This seemed particularly to be the case in the areas of partial shade.

• I should have invested straw blankets, burlap, or even put down a little loose straw from a bale for those parts of my lawn that were blasted by full sun, all day, every day.

  • Try as I might, even in Spring this last year, there were parts I just could not for the life of me keep damp. That's life on the Plains; it's not often, but I do envy those in damper climates sometimes.

  • There will likely be spots around your lawn that are the same. Unless you stay at home all day, every day, for three weeks, you WILL have spots that will dry out. A cover keeps the earthy moist and lets you have a life.

  • The straw mats are also great for other things. They help prevent bird predation of your seeds and they're useful for seeding on a slope. Not something I've personally tried, but I have seen done whenever ground around here is disrupted and reseeded to return to native prairie.

• What if you've done it all right and tried every trick in the book but still have bare spots? There are a variety of things that I tried that I might suggest.

  • If it's so hot and dry that your seeds won't go, try plugs or seedlings. I got some grama grass plugs from a nursery because grama is perfect for hot and dry.

  • Transplant the ones that did make it! in keeping with the above, if you have one area in your lawn that seems to grow things easily, gently and carefully dig up some of your successful plants (once they are more than 6" tall!) and move them to the spots where seeds aren't taking. Then reseed where you borrowed.

  • Hardscape. If plants won't take in a troublesome spot, try hardscape. I ate up quite a bit of tough real estate with a meandering path of paving stones I had laying around. I wanted a path anyway, but waiting til the lawn had grown and settled a bit let me put it where things didn't grow. A small patio, a little rock garden, something that isn't alive and will be pretty while taking up space is perfect.

    
    

• Reframe the bare spots in your brain as an opportunity to put in more plants! I don't know about you, but half the fun in turning dirt is in the imagining of the plants you can put there.

  • The disappointment at bare spots in the new lawn turned to happiness when I realized that it gave me a chance to add more perennials.

  • It needn't even cost money either: the Fall of the year I converted my turf, I started dividing some of my perennials and those divisions (bearded iris as an example) got put into bare spots. Next Spring's divisions will also be going into the pollinator lawn (get ready for some liatris).

I hope this has been helpful and wish you luck in converting to a bee lawn. Keep the goal in mind when your energy starts to flag. Imagine the abundant life you will be bringing to your yard: the pollinators who will come for some clover but stay to pollinate your veggies, the birds who come and skitter around in the plants looking for bugs, and, depending on your seed mix, the money you'll save by not watering!