Yellow rattle - naturally helping to maintain grassland

Urban Green Shoots is sharing information about how to grow Yellow rattle Rhinanthus minor, an important plant to help establish and maintain wildflowers in grassland meadows.

Yellow Rattle helps keep more dominant grasses in check by attaching to and drawing nutrients from their root systems, which in turn gives less pioneering wildflowers more opportunity to gain a foothold and thrive.

It has been heralded by the plant conservation organisation Plantlife as 'the meadow maker' or 'natures lawnmower', and they also suggest that it is the single most important to establish when creating a wildflower meadow: Plantlife Meadows | Yellow rattle

There is some excellent information about how to source, sow and maintain Yellow Rattle provided at: https://meadows.plantlife.org.uk/making-meadows/yellow-rattle/

Cornwall Council has been collecting yellow rattle seeds from the species rich wildflower meadow at Tehidy Country Park for several years, and been introducing this to selected public green spaces and urban verges in order to help reduce the competition by grasses and help allow wildflowers to flourish. This has been a great success, benefitting from the local seed's suitability to the Cornish climate, with most sites seeing good rates of establishment and regrowth in subsequent years. In line with best practice for yellow rattle meadows, these locations are then managed on a reduced mowing cycle, whereby they are cut after the seed has fallen in late summer, with the cuttings removed so that nutrients from the grass off-take aren't returned to the soil, a practice that also helps favour wildflowers by reducing nutrient availability for rapid growing grasses.

To get a copy of an information sheet about sourcing, sowing and maintaining yellow rattle, please visit the documents bar of this Let's talk page.