No Mow May - as it happened
Last month, I rashly undertook to take part in the No Mow May initiative in order to encourage wild flowers and pollinators into my garden. This is what happened when the lawn mower was locked up for a month.
May 1st 2021
The lawn was cut yesterday and it is all looking good, despite the driest April on record. The edges need neatening up, but there is too much else to be getting on with in the garden. Potting on, plants going in and out of the greenhouse for hardening off, digging up Arum Maculatum, thinking about jet washing the patio…
May 8th 2021
Rain! and plenty of it. The lawn looks greener already, pretty uniform and even, with just one tufty bit on the right. All very acceptable and I don’t feel the need to mow it at all.
Beginning to think that it might be nice to have daisies growing in the grass like the old days.
15th May 2021
Two weeks in and still raining! Everything looking green and lush. At this point I would usually be thinking “That lawn definitely needs a cut!” but is it really that bad? The edges are a bit tatty but I never got round to trimming them so it isn’t a fair test. No sign of any wildflowers, probably because weedkiller has been applied up to now. Would really like a few daisies.
22nd May 2021
The day after the storm. Well, it is definitely looking scruffy now and there is quite a bit of storm debris from the trees which the lawn mower would hoover up nicely. It is getting to the gritting my teeth stage now!
Wonder how long it would be before daisies start to appear, and clover, and buttercups - they might make it look better.
May 29th and still three more days to go!
This is really challenging! The grass is undeniably long. The borders are visually disappearing into the grass, and the grass is beginning to encroach on the borders. All definition in the garden has been lost. In order to stop mowing in my garden between 4 weekly intervals, I would have to redesign it entirely, which at this stage of the game really isn’t feasible.
Another disappointment is that no wildflowers have appeared in the lawn, not a single one. No doubt this is because of all the weedkiller, and maybe all the fertiliser, that has been applied over the past few years - that was hardly natural.
So, what to do? I can understand the need to cut back on the pollution of frequent mowing and lawn management. Even more so I recognise the need to protect the environment, our wild flowers, our insect life, our pollinators, for their own sakes’ but also for ours. And it has been lovely to see all wildflowers on the roadsides and in peoples’ front gardens during No Mow May - it has made Marden feel very rural.
So I really can’t go back to my old ways, but the way forward needs a lot of thought, and some experimentation. That is what I’m going to do through June. On the 1st of June, though, the lawn mower will come out of the shed, to the sound of cheers.