Establishing a Wildflower Garden

I started my desert wildflower garden just over three years ago. I didn’t really know what to expect at the start, except that I was sowing native wildflower seeds, so they should grow well in the desert. Although I love my wildflower garden, there have been difficulties along the way.

• How to distinguish wildflowers from weeds?
• Should I set boundaries?
• What do I do when the plants die?
• How to water a wildflower garden?

Wildflower or Weed?

It can be difficult to tell what is an invasive weed and what is a wildflower, especially when they are just young sprouts. My best advice is to let it grow until you are sure what it is. If you pull it and its not a weed you can’t get it back! If you don’t pull it and it is a weed, you can always pull it later. Last spring I spent a lot of time picking a “weed” that had grown profusely in my wildflower garden. I missed a few, and they matured and bloomed. Then I realized it was Plains Coreopsis, a beatiful wildflower that I had sown as seeds.

Once you have a lot of experience with local weeds and the wildflowers you have sown, it will become easier to identify them and avoid growing weeds or killing wildflowers. Some plants have very distinct foliage, like lupins, California poppies, and stinknet. Other flowers can look very generic when they are young (blanket flower, sunflower, dandelions, grasses). I would suggest letting the plants grow until they have flowers or fruit and then trying to take a picture and use AI identification to tell what they are. I prefer plant net https://plantnet.org/en/, but there are lots of other good tools.

Setting Boundaries

There are two options when planning a wildflower garden: allow them to spread or contain them. There are advantages and disadvantages of each method, and you should understand them before trying anthing out. It is very difficult to change your mind once you establish the wildflower garden.

	Spreading Wildflowers	Contained Garden
Picking unwanted plants	you just have to let it grow	you can pick weeds and thin dominating flowers to balance the garden
Cleaning up dead plants	you may have to rely on natural decomposition	picking and composting
Watering	hope for rain	irrigation
Sowing seeds	you will rely heavily on natural re-seeding	hard to find space to sow new seeds
Re-seeding	this is your crop for next year	you need to pull all of the wildflowers that spread outside your bounds
Space	maximum space	limited space
Nature	most natural	artificial bounds
Neighbours	may complain if they spread outside your yard or look “weedy”	should be safe

In my yard I have a contained wildflower garden. It cannot spread into the neighbors yard because of the block wall fence. Any plant that escapes the boundary must be pulled. Earlier, I had tried letting them spread through my yard, but they got out of control and I decided that it wasn’t for me. However, some of my neighbors have spreading wildflowers and I love the look of their yards in the spring.

What to do when plants die?

The wildflowers are often anuals or short-lived plants. Once they die, they can look unsightly and prevent other plants from growing. Although it is more natural to let them decompose in place, many people will desire to accelerate the process. I collect all of my dead wildflowers and stack them up in the sun to dry them out. Then I feed them through an electric wood chipper to create a mulch. I use the mulch around my garden, or add it to my compost pile.

How to water a wildflower garden?

My first choice for watering is rainwater harvesting and earthworks. My second choise for watering is drip irrigation. Since wildflowers gardens contain many plants growing at unpredictable locations this can be difficult. If you let your wildflowers spread around your yard, then no specific irrigation is called for. If you have a contained wildflower garden, I would recommend drip irrigation fan spreaders. They use a modest amount of water and cover a decent area.

One problem we always have in Arizona, is degradation of plastic irrigation parts in the sun. It is best to keep as much of the irrigation underground as possible. In my wildflower garden I am currently using buried drip irrigation, similar to what I have in my vegetable garden in the video below.