posted: Apr 21, 2010

A few days of sunshine in between rainy days gave us a nice window to seed two fields with native wildflowers.  We seeded the Lewis flax (Linum lewisii) into 1/2 acre field located next to our seed increase plot on Paradise Ridge.  The Lewis flax is a beautiful blue wildflower and we look forward to watching this field take off this summer.



The second field we seeded was 4 acres of Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata) in a field just above the seed increase plot.



Both fields were seeded using a Truax no-till drill.  The Lewis flax has a black oval-shaped seed which fed through the hopper well,



and resulted in nice evenly spaced seeds within the rows. 






The blanketflower seeding proved a bit more tricky.  Blanketflower seed looks a bit like a badminton birdie. 



The "fluffy" nature of this seed presented some challenges with getting the seed to feed through the hoppers. 



Mixing rice hulls in with the blanketflower seed to act as a carrier worked well, so with this figured out we were able to complete these 4 acres before the rains came.