Making Meadows: A Northwest Meadowscapes Zine
Our first publication, Making Meadows: Creating Wildflower Ecosystems West of the Cascade Mountains, is a guide to everything we wished we had known about creating and managing meadows and prairies when we first started out. It's a direct, and hopefully useful response to the dozens of questions we get from folks everyday about these beautiful ecosystems.
An 80+ page (!!!) paperback zine, this guide is “crafted” in cut & paste, mostly black and white, xerographic collage-style. Visually, it’s maybe best compared to the kind of disheveled mess of scientific papers, scribbled building plans and farm implement catalogs that pile up on our work desks. Or, like an urban wall that has been painted over again and again, and had inch-thick layers of flyers stapled to it – a wall that eventually turns into its own secret record of time.
The actual content includes:
- A brief overview of Pacific Northwest meadow and prairies natural history – the minimally basic stuff to know!
- The basic landscape benefits of meadows – the living values they provide in human occupied spaces
- At-a-glance profiles of more than 50-species of wildflowers, grasses, and sedges, including basic plant traits, relative bloom times, preferred soil drainage, and growth characteristics
- How to prepare new areas for meadow creation
- How to design and formulate your own seed mix
- Recommended seeding methods
- Using bulbs and transplants
- Site preparation, planting, and management timelines
- Common problems that arise in new meadows
- Managing erosion in newly planted areas
- Maintenance practices to maintain meadow health
- Common weeds, and some honest recommendations on how to most effectively beat them back
- Troubleshooting typical challenges that often show up in meadows down the road, such as the decline in wildflower abundance, and the dominance of grasses
- And a whole bunch more