Does anyone direct sow on a fairly big scale and have success with it? How do you do it? I started a large (~3800 square feet) flower garden (and vegetable garden) in 2011. That year I sowed cover crop seeds, which came in so thickly that I didn't weed; I just cut everything down at the end and composted it.

Well, a lot of weed seeds got added to my soil bank that year, especially black medic and dandelion. Black medic germinates the most three years after getting into the soil, so I have rampant medic everywhere this year. I'm literally beginning to get carpal tunnel syndrome from all the hours of weeding, and yet all the weeds are back in a few weeks. I think almost all of the new ones were already in the soil below the mulch, not seeds that blew in later on top of the mulch.

Obviously I need to change my strategy, which had involved direct sowing seeds. I sowed 15,000 lupine seeds in 2012, which did so well that there's a lupine about every square foot now. In May and November of 2013, and April and September of 2014 (got my seeds in the fridge now), I sowed about 1.5 million of about 130 different species, which did terribly. They did pretty well in a two-foot wide ring around the vegie garden, but did almost nothing when in competition with the lupines and weeds in the flower beds. I had been leaving the native soil bare so that they could germinate. Many were native wildflowers, which can take a long time.

Now I'm using partially composted pine bark fines ("Soil Pep") for mulch, and I've found it completely ineffective in the amounts I've been using: half inch, inch, inch and a half do nothing. So now I'm trying two inches, and if I have to I'll try two and a half or three inches. Anything to keep from being permanently disabled and unable to work for the next ten years because of these weeds.

So after I finally (fingers crossed) get the weed situation more under control, how would I direct sow seeds? Or should I just give up on ever direct sowing again? Could I sprinkle a little compost mixed with sphagnum moss on top of the mulch and sow? For what it's worth, I sowed the lupine seeds half an inch directly into 100% Soil Pep and they germinated really well if they didn't dry out. Now they've become almost like weeds that I have to deadhead to keep them from reseeding so much.

I would really appreciate some feedback and advice on direct sowing. I've done a lot of research, on GardenWeb forums, elsewhere on the web, and in books. I've found very little information on large-scale direct sowing, especially regarding weed control.

This post was edited by myrmayde on Fri, Aug 22, 14 at 16:30