Oct. 4. 2024

Now is the time to sow wildflower seeds in Texas.

On a different schedule from our cultivated gardens, the sowing season for wildflowers runs from September till mid-November. 

Wildflowers often require a period of wintry weather to germinate to produce spring blooms. Bluebonnets and native sunflowers will sprout and put on initial growth even during the iciest arctic cold fronts that come in January and February. 

I was about 12 years old in the early 1980s when I began to collect bluebonnet seeds from neighboring properties for spreading out on the former cotton field where I lived in Waxahachie and still live to this day. 

Spring-blooming Indian paintbrush are part of a rotating palette of color. Photo by Marshall Hinsley.

The final cotton crop was harvested as the house was built in the mid 1970s. So the land had been totally denuded of all vegetation. All the wildflowers that grow on it now have either been restored from subsequent seeding or have sprouted from long dormant wild seed that survived nearly a century of crop production. 

As a reporter for Green Source DFW and the Texas Green Report podcast, many of my pieces have promoted growing native plants instead of water-wasting exotic flowers and grasses.

I’ve specifically covered how to restore wildlife habitat by creating a pocket prairie.

The need for prairie restoration is so great that even sectioning off a dinner table-sized plot devoted to densely sowing just one species — say, bluebonnets, prairie verbena or Texas thistles — will likely attract butterflies and bumble bees in the very first season. 

This is a message that I practice. 

This year, I will sow about 50 pounds of wildflower seeds over about five acres. Most of the seed is from a wildflower mix, but I have also bought pounds of specific seeds such as bluebonnets and milkweed, just to ensure a healthy showing of two of my favorites. 

Fall aster are late bloomers. Photo by Marshall Hinsley.

BUYING SEEDS

Native American Seed in New Braunfels is my main source now for wildflower seeds. The staff are experts in the field and have advanced the sowing of the more obscure natives like no other company. 

Wildseed Farms in Fredericksburg is also a resource that I use for wildflower seed mixes that are native to Texas. 

For large projects that require several pounds of wildflower seeds, I’ve relied on Turner Seed in Breckenridge. 

I do not plant potted bluebonnets, milkweed or any other native flowers that have cropped up in recent years at garden centers. Natives tend to have long taproots, and they are usually stunted when their roots are disturbed.

I’m also reluctant to buy potted natives because several years ago I found that the ones I had planted to help pollinators had in fact been treated with neonicotinoid insecticides that would sicken or kill the bees and butterflies that fed from them. Understandably, the goal of nurseries is often to prevent insect damage, but the aim of a wildflower planting is to provide for insects, which usually means that insects will indeed eat a part of the plant. 

A bug sits atop a goldenrod in Waxahachie. Photo by Marshall Hinsley.

THREE SEASONS OF BLOOMS

From decades of sowing and strategic mowing — only in midsummer and early winter — the land where I live has a population of bluebonnets in the spring, followed by milkweed, Indian blanket and native sunflowers in the summer, and then goldenrod, Maximilian sunflowers, eryngoes and delicate asters in the fall. 

The spring-to-fall parade of color that they bring each year, feeds butterflies, bees, wasps, birds and other wildlife. 

And I’m content to know that the property now feeds migrating monarchs as they head north in the spring and back south in the fall. 

RESOURCES
The following nonprofits offer tips for creating pocket prairies.
The Native Prairies Assocation of Texas
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
The Tarrant Regional Water District

A bee visits a maximilian sunflower. Photo by Marshall Hinsley.

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