the Meadow Manual
Meadow building assistance from ArcheWild®
Building quality, authentic meadows is hard.
Meadow-design and meadow-building are ecological engineering exercises that require decades of long-term experience over 100s of different contexts to get them right. Yet few land managers have full-cycle experience with even one.
ArcheWild® was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, with support from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and PA DCNR to offer an open-source meadow-building toolkit that mirrors the process, tools, and techniques that we use every day.
Natural East Coast meadows are rare and limited to unique geomorphic conditions that occur in isolated patches, and many are protected under conservation easements.
Almost everywhere else wants to be a forest and, therefore, lacks the constraining conditions required to establish true meadows, so meadows must be built and actively managed.
92.8% of meadow projects fail to meet original expectations. There can be many reasons but the four most common are related to challenges with:
#1 – Site preparation,
#2 – Species selection,
#3 – Planting technique,
#4 – Constituent communication.
The videos, documents, and articles on this page are provided to help the professional land manager to tackle these challenges with step-by-step guidelines, checklists, examples, and illustrative images.
Meadows are not landscaping features and any attempt to treat them like gardens, with many dozens of carefully curated species and intricate design patterns, are destined to fail. Instead, this toolkit treats meadow design and meadow building with the precision and predictability of an engineering exercise.
An integral part of the meadow building process is choosing the correct species for your meadow context. We offer Evaluate™ as an “ecologist-in-your-pocket” tool to help guide you through making good decisions about your new meadow project. Registration is required and access is free for six months when you complete the PEC-sponsored meadow training curriculum.
Evaluate™ automatically generates zone-specific seed mixes according to your budget and ecological goals. No pre-designed seed mixes! Every seed mix is created for the unique characteristics of your site, and you don’t need to use EXCEL. The software handles all of the calculations for you.
For use by ArcheWild® partners, clients, and students only.
Write contact@archewild.com to inquire about training and obtaining login credentials
Evaluate, our meadow builder tool, builds on our growing suite of site evaluation and species selection technologies to create an online, phone-capable, and easy-to-use tool for professional land managers that need to build meadows that work the first time.
There is no library of pre-defined seed mixes. That method doesn’t work.
Instead, species are considered strictly by evaluating your site against 100s of naturally occurring meadows and narrowing the species list to those that will work and filtered by those that you can actually buy.
Seed mix proportions are based on botanist-validated element occurrence data collected by ArcheWild® throughout the mid-Atlantic over the last two decades.
Meadow-Seeding Video
This video covers topics not commonly found in other YouTube videos. Learn an advanced method for calibrating your seed drill, working in adverse conditions, and safe/efficient seeding operation.
The Meadow Design Exercise is a downloadable matching game to help reinforce many of the concepts in the training guidebook. Projects and their associated designs are randomized in the game. Assign people to Teams and guide them through matching the Design to the Project.
Your 20-page Checklist Toolkit
This shortform toolkit reveals the essential steps for reliably designing and building authentic meadows for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
Meadow-Building Guidebook
This full guidebook provides sufficient instructions to successfully guide you through your first meadow, or your 100th. Subject to changes and updates. Last published in February 2026.
Introducing Evaluate™
Evaluate™ is an advanced yet easy-to-use software application that helps you to discover the most appropriate vegetation systems for your meadow and helps to create a site-appropriate seed mix. Watch the training video to learn about its key features. Onboarding guide included in the software. use requires registration and a license agreement.
