How to grow a wildflower meadow in a pot or container

Hi I'm Emily from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and today I'm going to teach you how to grow your own wildflower meadow in a pot or a container of your choice. So today I'm using this lovely old flower pot. You can use anything, get creative with old washing up bowls or welly boots, just make sure that whatever you're using has got drainage holes in the bottom to let all the water seep out. And today I'm going to be using the wildflower seed mix from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. You get one of these for free with your membership to the Trust. So it's full of cornflowers, poppies and other really beautiful rich annuals and perennials that bumblebees absolutely love. And now what I'm going to grow these in is some homegrown compost. So this pot is about three quarters full of my own compost from our compost bin here in the garden. If you don't have your own homegrown compost, getting some peat-free compost from the garden centre, I would also always suggest peat-free because that's a much more environmentally friendly option. So to prepare your pot I would just fill the compost lightly. There is this temptation to like pat it down but I really wouldn't do that. I would just sort of let it all fall in. You want it kind of crumbly, a bit like baking. You want a nice crumbly mix so you're just slightly putting it in. You're not patting it down, you're not trying to get like a smooth surface. So, oh there's some lovely worms in there. Okay so it's almost at the top and I don't need it right at the top so I'm going to leave it like that, spread it all around but really lightly. And then I'm going to open my seed packet. Now this probably covers a couple of square metres which I really don't need for this. That's probably about the size of a single bed, maybe a little bit bigger. So for this I'm going to just take out all the seeds that I need. As you can see here there's a really lovely mix of seeds and what you want to do is just lightly drop them onto the soil and give them all a little bit of room so you can sort of let them fall through behind your fingers or just tap your hand slightly to let them all fall out. Okay so I've added some of the seeds from my packet and I'm going to save the rest for somewhere else in my garden or maybe another pot or container. So the pot is now filled with these seeds and I don't need to press them in or pat them down, I'm just going to very lightly cover them with a little bit more compost but just enough so that they're sort of snug under the surface, they're not sort of pushed down or anything before we water. And then once you've added that little extra bit of compost over the seeds, you can give it a light watering, preferably with a watering can with a rose head or a spray bottle or something else light and gentle that's going to not disturb the seeds too much. You don't need to pat it down or anything, just leave it be and you can leave it in a sunny spot and wait for a couple of weeks and there should be some tiny little seedlings that come out, which is always really exciting, and then just wait for the wildflowers to bloom all summer long.