Sowing the seeds

On Wednesday our neighbour, Jean-Pierre, very kindly took an hour off from maize planting and brought his large tractor to plough the wild-flower 'field' (it has worked out to be exactly one third of an acre). As we said, it is the area beyond the pond and it is quite a complicated shape, and includes some very nice trees - but Jean-Pierre and tractor were great, breaking up the turf and then rolling it to a fairly even surface, ready to take the wild-flower seeds:

A really brilliant job - and one that would have taken us days to do with a rotivator and by hand. However! ... the seeding has to be done by hand and it is important to ensure an even spread of the seeds - the seed mixture includes a range of seeds, some of which are quite large but others almost microscopic  -  so, we started by making a one metre frame and moving this 'step by step' across the ploughed area:

- measuring out the correct amount of seed per square metre - 4 grams:

The area, as we've said, is around 230 square metres .... so, this method soon felt like being rather labour-intensive'! So, we changed the method to one metre-wide lines across the area and allocated 40-50 grams per line:

Well, sowing is now complete - and since then we have had a halving of temperatures (from @ 28 degree C to 14 degrees), but also some rain, which is helpful. Germination should take place within 6 weeks or so - by the end of June .... there will be 'photos (or not)!