I live in the Kansas City area which is comfortably Zone 6 from my understanding.
We’ve recently purchased our first house and the yard work is super time consuming! With .5 acres just mowing alone takes like 2 hours with my push mower due to all the trees and hills in the yard. I would like to have a pollinator friendly yard while also not having to spend so much time mowing. Using less gas in general would also be neat.
What I am thinking of doing is prior to first snow fall, over-seed with wildflowers from American Medows for most of the yard, and then in areas with some foot traffic, plant a mixture of clover and native grasses and then only worry about mowing in that area periodically.
Has anybody else ever over seeded with wildflowers? A lot of stuff I see posted here (and formerly on reddit) seem to be a bunch of elegant but hard and time consuming work like ripping up the yard, putting cardboard and mulch down, and then planting over that. However, I don’t really have the time and money to do all that 🙁. Would I have desirable results with just over-seeding?
Don’t bother with mulching, and start small, with the size of an area you think you can handle.
Peel back the sod, till up the topsoil a bit, and then seed with competitive wild flowers at a high rate.
I’ll be establishing a meadow next year. You can always do the cardboard and wood chip method of you want, should make it easier and cleaner to start. But wildflowers usually grow a lot taller than grass and “weeds” so they’ll out compete them anyways.