While we have never had a meadow, I grew up with them (hayfields) when we lived at my maternal grandparents’ farm-going-back-to-bush (Grandpa was 80 when I was born…) While the pastures that had been grazed by his Jersey dairy herd were left to be overtaken by trees and shrubs, he let a local farmer have the hay in order to have the hayfields mowed and cleared each summer. They were usually mowed in mid-late July and that was sufficient to keep timothy grass as the primary plant. I remember wild strawberries growing well where the grass was thin, and there were Canterbury Bells growing in the grass. They must have been escapees from the garden that his mother had started :-) I remember being surprised to find they were biennials when I tried to grow them in my first garden! Nobody ever did anything to them in the hayfield - they just came back every year on their own! Grandpa’s property was in southern NB on the eastern end of Canada so I’m not sure how comparable the growing conditions would be relative to yours but I’d think it should be an easily managed situation for you.

I think I have the kind of meadow you're talking about. I mow around August and then maybe once again after the asters are finished to just clean it up for next year (before the snow mats it all down). I suspect mine is tiny compared to yours. I use a push mower and just plow through on a high setting without much trouble, but if it gets too thick I'll tilt the mower up on its back wheels to give it a pre-cut. Obviously you'd want to be careful trying this and with a riding mower probably don't even have to worry about having trouble getting through.

An August mowing is kind of early for rudbeckias so I mow around the thickest patches, and I also mow around a few butterfly weeds until the seed ripens (Asclepsias), but most everything else gets a chop.

I pull Queen Anne's lace in bloom so it doesn't take over, and spray weed b gone on mugwort and crownvetch which are probably my worst weeds. Every now and then I get a few clumps of Timothy grass which I also pull since my meadow is mostly smaller cool season grasses and the Timothy grass is more of a hayfield look. Just last week I scalped a big section to try and keep stilt grass from going to seed. Wish me luck on that one.

Right now it's mostly grasses of various sorts and "weeds" like chickory, feverfew, lots of stuff I haven't yet learned to identify. I haven't seen any woodies popping up yet -- will have to keep an eye on that. I planted culls from my perennial bed and a few things I picked up specifically to plant back there -- milkweed, ageratum (blue mist), rudbeckia, etc. But the grass has a really strong foothold -- it was a grazing pasture, after all.

So does DH need to mow it all down in the late fall, or should he just leave it to fall naturally? This isn't really a "wild" area -- we can see it directly out the back windows, and so can our neighbors.

ETA: It is satisfying to see insects I've never seen before take up residence now that I've planted a lot more natives and letting this area turn into a meadow. Saw this beauty yesterday: Bug Eric: Wasp Wednesday: Four-toothed Mason Wasp

I've been digging up pokeweed when I see it and whatever I think might be pokeweed. There's some other hip-height stuff I've got to dig out, too -- not sure what it is, though, but it looks really "weedy" and seems to want to take over. The soil is soft and super-easy to dig, probably from all those years (decades?) of being passively manured, so shouldn't be too much work; it's finding the time to do it that is the problem.

I had to laugh -- you know how we try so hard to grow beautiful annuals? Water, fertilize, and tend them? Way back on old manure pile amidst all sorts of assorted grasses and plants there is a clump of the most beautiful purple-magenta zinnia out there all by itself, no-one to care for it, no zinnia friends in sight, and it has been blooming it's fool head off all summer long. I WISH the zinnia up by the house looked that good LOL! Must have been a random bird drop.

I wouldn't worry too much about mowing, and lean towards over-mowing rather than letting it go too long. -and that's mostly to keep your neighbors and husband happy while you get a feel for how it grows. Just enjoy seeing all the new life move in, and know that anything you do is more diverse than just a cut yawn... I mean 'lawn'.

I can't back this up with any legit research, but personally I feel better mowing in parts and not doing the whole thing at once just because the cut areas always look so desolate and I want a few longer sections for things to escape to when the mower comes through.

Also I think you'll be surprised when you see how easily some perennials handle regular mowing. Sometimes for woody control (mostly sumacs, aspens, pears) I'll keep parts mowed as lawn from August to frost. Everything pops right back next summer and I think it might actually help some perennial seedlings get more light.

I do, but it is an ongoing, ever changing and frequently frustrating project. I started it 5 years ago and have finally achieved some sort of balance where I keep the grasses short over winter so that it is basically a spring alpine meadow with little wildflowers and bulbs. I wanted a much lusher, longer look but had to settle for what is basically more like a grassy mead.

I did not have DH mow in the spring -- oh dear... The "grass" or whatever it is, is about 5 foot tall and once it turned brown in early summer has remained that way -- which leads me to believe it's not grass but some sort of grain or hay. Can't see any wildflowers except a few really tall oddball ones. I have no clue whether what I lanted back there actually lived (milkweed, ageratum, cup plant, etc), I can't find any of it even when I tried walking through the sea of head-high dead...whatever. So now I have to figure out how to get all that dealt with, that is definitely not the look I wanted. I'll post a separate thread when I have pics.

I have a brush hog on a tractor and mow annually, though it hasn‘t gotten done this summer because I am packing up for a move. i do it in fall, though some folks prefer early spring. I find spring is too wet and the snow has often matted everything down. I also have a scythe for the areas too steep to feel comfortabel on the tractor.

As mad gallica said, the woody plants will move in if it isn’t cut down periodically, and we bought this property we had to remove poison ivy, sumac, and young early succession trees like white pines and black cherries.

I hired a local guy with a tractor to brush hog it, so problem solved but my wallet is now a few hundred lighter....lesson learned --> DH is going to have to mow once or twice in the late spring to take down whatever that crop is, then let it fill in a la meadow after cutting.

Um, meadows are pretty heterogenous...there are numerous variations of growing stuff in grass. I decided to have an early haymeadow, so I use a lot of spring bulbs and early summer perennials (such as ox-eye daisies, meadow-rue, anemones, cowslips and so on...and do a cut in July, keeping the space mowed until November, when the buklbs start to show again. I had wanted to have later summer bloomers such as scabious, sanguisorba, achilleas but by then, the grass was too long and lodged all over the place. Seems you can have one or the other (early or late) but not both.

Mine has been ongoing for a few years now. It is both a delight and source of frustration as I really don't know exactly what I am doing and still feeling my way. It may be a low-maintenance option in a few more years but since this is a totally artificial little space, I generally treat it like any other bed or border (continual weeding, editing and so on).

The oft-repeated advice (here in the UK)- to simply dispense with grass cutting is laughably vague and optimistic - fairly useless unless you are OK with a thistly weedy mess.

I think your space is probably a whole lot bigger than my small, 40m2 experiment, mxk3

mxk, this is from the NH Ag department about from their publication about establishing meadows, if it helps:

"Once the meadow is finished flowering and freezes kill the last of the asters to the ground, consider the beauty in the structure and golden colors of standing seed heads and grasses, which the birds will appreciate well into the winter. If you need to tidy up, mow the meadow down in November or leave it stand until early spring. Mow high (6-8” or higher) and wildlife will continue to nest and forage in the meadow through the winter and spring. Mowing every year is not required; its primary purpose is to discourage woody shrubs and trees from taking over. If you have a large meadow area, consider mowing only one-third or one-quarter of it each year, leaving the rest for winter habitat."

Mowing half in fall and half in spring sounds like a good compromise.

asked from Europe, is a meadow another type of prairie or rather a field to produce hay?

Just wondering.

I am amazed by the not-mowing advice, around here, any meadow turns into shrub land, blackberry thicket and woodland.

and prairies are adapted to regular burning, keeping it free from trees, arent they?

TBF, most of the 'put away your mower' advice relates to small suburban and urban gardens...not acreage. It does have some utility since even our common lawn weeds (achillea, daisies, plantain, shepher's purse, dandelions and such), has value for wildlife

I think the term 'meadow' has generic meanings which may be different from botanical (or agricultural) definitions of semi-natural grassland. Without intervention, areas will revert to scrub, then eventually woodland, so meadows do require some external effort (and. according to Christopher Lloyd 'constructive, hard thinking).