yellow rattle

My first job of the day was to sow the yellow rattle seed.  The boss had told me to do this at once, and that it wouldn't take in very thick grass, so I should scarify the area.  This was tricky in the long grass at the bottom of the back garden, given that we don't generally cut it until September, and I was fairly sure the Systems Administrator wasn't going to want to cut it now given the combination of heat and humidity has the SA wilting like a lettuce left too long out of the fridge.

I went around the edges of the mini meadow, reaching as far in as I could and cutting open patches with shears, then scratching the surface up with a trowel, and sprinkling in a few rattle seeds.  After a while I devised the method of using each patch to stand on while I cut another further in, before sowing the seed, to give me access into the middle of the long grass without leaving trampled down tracks.  The intermittent bald spots looked odd, but not as bad as if I'd beaten paths into it.

I hadn't grasped until the young gardener said so on Monday that yellow rattle is an annual plant, having imagined that as it lived on the roots of the grass it would be perennial, a patch gradually increasing in width from year to year.  Not so, according to the website of the excellent wild seed specialists Emorsgate.  A friend used their seeds to establish a perennial meadow in her garden and got very good results.  Once I knew that a fresh generation of rattle would need to germinate and grow each year I began to worry that my grass was too tall and rank, and that if I got any plants in the first year from my sown seed, they wouldn't be enough to reduce the vigour of the sward and their seed would fail to grow for the following year.  Emorsgate were not entirely reassuring on this point, saying that it would not thrive in all conditions and preferred a fine sward to rank grass.  Our grass is pretty rank, on the other hand if it were already fine I wouldn't be so fussed about using a hemi-parasite to weaken it.

Emorsgate and Wikipedia both told me to sow seed in the autumn, for germination and establishment the following spring, whereas the boss was emphatic that it must be done at once.  If I'd left it until autumn I could have done it after we'd mown the grass.  On the other hand, if it isn't going to germinate until after Christmas it won't mind if we cut the grass above it, apart from the risk that the odd seed might stick to our boots or the tractor tyres and be carried away and wasted.

I'll just have to wait and see what happens.  The Systems Adminstrator's brother has sown seed in two successive years as part of a Wealden meadows project, with no success, so I knew that getting it to go was not going to be completely straightforward.  Still, learning by doing is part of what gardening is all about.