The Meadow Bed

Despite several tries, I just can't seem to get a good meadoe bed established.  The 1st year was good, though rather uniform..
It went downhill fast, with weeds and grasses taking over.  And mock strawberries.

So I decided to start again.  Tilled the soil and raked it so there were furrows.  Watered it deeply.  Then scratched up the soil again.  This time, I planted 3 circles of sunflowers, then scattered various annual seeds I had saved from some potted deck plants last year.

The idea isn't to establish a meadow bed this year, but to grow annuals that will shade the weeds out for a proper planting next Spring.  Lots of saved marigold seeds and leftover seeds.  It's late in the year, so I don't expect much.

But one never knows and a bed of marigolds and some random flowers is better than weeds and grass.

I saved a few Queen Anne's Lace that grew naturally.  And I also have some purple coneflowers growing in the garden paths to try to transplant (yeah, this is the wrong time of year for that, but I need to remove them from the paths anyway) and there are black-eyed susans all over the place so I wil try some of them too in clumps.

Here is what the bed looks like now...

It will be interesting to see what it looks like next month.  It may look just as dead or it may have some transplants surviving with new flowers growing.  We'll see...

That's the amazing thing about growing plants.  You never really know what you will get.