The title, "preparing the ground", sounds very grand. In fact, I did very little preparation but there were a couple of things to take care of before I started to think about flowers.
First, some of the wooden posts at the edge of the meadow had fallen away. So I organised for someone to replace the missing posts. This cost around £200 but was worth it.
The next thing was that the brambles on the right hand side of the meadow had encroached by 3 or 4 metres since I had moved in about five years before. I asked a friend of mine, who is a tree surgeon, if he could get rid of the brambles. We decided to keep the brambles along the back edge and just along the right hand side because they are good for wildlife, but to take back the chunk of bramble which had grown in. My friend decided that he would use his stump grinder and the benefit of that was that it would leave totally bare soil where the brambles had been (I had found out by this time that cornflowers love disturbed ground and I was determined to get cornflowers back on the meadow). He charged me £150 which was very reasonable considering the amount of work involved. But you can see that getting started is not necessarily cheap.
The removal of the brambles turned out to be a good move as it left a good few metres of bare ground in which to sow seeds which would be harder to establish in the existing grass. By this time, we were approaching autumn 2010.
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