Sowing Yellow Rattle
Yellow Rattle is an attractive annual of hay meadows. It is partially parasitic on some other grassland species and will often reduce the vigour of adjacent coarse grasses, resulting in transient dominance of Yellow Rattle in patches across a field. Each patch triggers a succession, allowing other sown species to establish in the vacant niches left by Yellow Rattle.
Broadcast Yellow Rattle seed in the autumn onto existing scarified grassland allowing for a sowing rate between 0.1g/m2 to 1g/m2. The seed requires vernalisation and will germinate in February or March of the following year. The plants flower in June and die after shedding seed in July.
Yellow Rattle can reduce the productivity of grassland, and its presence will increase and maintain species diversity of a meadow.
Yellow Rattle seed under a microscope
Look out for seedlings around the beginning of March
Flowering occurs from May through to September
Seed ripens from mid June within brown papery bladders