Sowing & Growing

Scatter the seeds onto the meticulously prepared level ground, lightly rake them in, and firm the soil if it’s loose by gently treading on it. Among the various annual species, these are the only ones we recommend sowing directly in their final flowering positions. They prove exceptionally easy to cultivate. In theory, with cornfield annuals, if the ground is cultivated again after the seeds are shed, the seeds will grow anew for the next year, allowing the process to be repeated indefinitely.

In practice, however, there is a tendency for other annual weed seeds to accumulate and/or for the cornfield mix to become unbalanced, often dominated by the early-germinating and robust corncockle. To sustain a cornfield annual mix on the same site, we believe it is optimal to collect seeds from the various species and then dig or plough over the site before re-sowing a meticulously prepared mixture.