I am still trying to increase the diversity of plants in the front meadow, so as I accumulate seeds during the year I add them to the meadow during fall (by the end of November). A good time to sow the seed is soon after the fall mowing, which this year was done in mid-October.
This is the collection of new seeds for fall 2026. In cases where I harvested seeds myself, even though I “cleaned” them to separate them from other plant parts, all the resulting chaff was spread onto the meadow as well. Whatever isn’t seed can function as mulch.
Redwhisker Clammyweed (Polanisia dodecandra) — seeds harvested (with permission) from volunteer plants at a local park. The coin is an American dime (18mm across).
American Basketflower (Centaurea americana) — seeds harvested from my own plants in the back garden
Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa) — seed heads from volunteer plants that were growing on the other side of the driveway from the meadow. These seeds are extremely hard to harvest, and I have never found a trustworthy source that sells them. In the photo below, I believe that the four tiny specks at the top are genuine seeds. However, it would be impossible to clean this up any further with any accuracy, and so the safest thing to do was to include the entire lot of crushed seed heads in the mix.
Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) — some from a seed giveaway (the slightly larger ones at the bottom) and some from our local Native Plant Society of Texas seed library (the smaller ones at the top)
Pocket Prairie seed mix — giveway from Native American Seed. This is a mixture of over 40 different prairie grasses and wildflowers, of which at least eight are already in the meadow. I don’t expect the whole collection to germinate, but if I can introduce a few new plants to the meadow, I’d be pleased with that.
Annual Winecup (Callirhoe leiocarpa) — purchased from Native American Seed. At this point I really don’t need to buy seed for the meadow any more. There seems to be a good seed bank in the ground now, and I can usually acquire additional seed from no-cost sources. However, I do like the deep pink color of winecups and would like to see them in my meadow, so I splurged with a gift card that I had been given.
The seeding was done on October 20, 2026.
I mixed all the seeds together (the first photo in this post). Then I mixed the seed with several handfuls of soil. This made it easier to scatter evenly, which was quickly done by hand.
Ideally, I would sow seeds just before a significant rain event, to push the seeds down to the ground and encourage good soil contact. However, the weather forecast was not hopeful this time and I actually hauled out my hosepipe and did a manual watering. It’s probably been over two years since I last watered the whole meadow area.
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