Making the lawn more bee-friendly

Our lawn is already fairly bee-friendly. I never use any pesticide there and although I pull up dandelions (because I find them really ugly - sorry bees, I know you love them) and anything prickly (so I can go barefoot on the lawn), I positively encourage other flowering plants there. This includes daisies, buttercups, clover - both white and red - and chamomile. OK, the chamomile never gets tall enough to flower, but the others do, leaving bees buzzing happily in their midst. You can't much see this in my blog photos, but you can if you walk out on the lawn in summer after it hasn't been cut for a while.

This year, however, I came up with a plan to make the lawn even more bee-friendly and to save me having to strim the edges. What I did was buy some bee-friendly meadow flower seeds. These include yellow rattle in the mix, which suppresses grass.

I then dug out a few centimetres with a spade all along the edge of the grass where I have to strim and turned the grass over. That done, I thinly scattered the seeds along the newly turned earth.

Cross your fingers that this goes well for me and we have beautiful flowers next year - or at the every least a return of grass. My other half is deeply unimpressed with me for destroying his neat edges, so a profusion of beautiful wildflowers buzzing with bees is just what I need to bring the smile back to his face. If not, watch this space for my desperate efforts to encourage back the grass!