Bee Garden

My previous post was regarding my Orchard Mason Bees. Being in a new house with a new yard which was previously tended by folks who didn't much like gardening, there isn't a lot around here to feed bees early in the spring, and I want to keep the bees here instead of having them fly off to play at the neighbors. I decided I really wanted to go dig up the giant Pieris japonicus from our old house, but I didn't know how it'd transplant, and as it's one of the few nice healthy shrubs in the backyard there, it seemed a little less than kind, too.

Instead, I went to Home Depot and found two smaller Pieris plants of two varieties, both loaded with not-yet-open blooms. I also picked up a not-yet-blooming-but-will-have-loads-of-flowers Viburnum, a Hellebore, and a pink Heather. After I selected them all, I realized...I was planting a bee garden. Seriously. A garden just to entice and retain early pollinators. Well why not? During the summer I plant borage just to entice the bees and other pollinators to come visit my vegetables, and it works like a charm. In fact, this year I plan to have the borage in pots that I can relocate around the vegetables as necessary. (The downside of that is how freely borage reseeds itself.) The key to being enticing to Mason Bees would be early and durable blooming; since I don't have fruit trees yet this year, the Pieris and heather should keep my little workers hanging around. Next year, hopefully I'll have both a large quantity of bees and many new fruit trees!

When we got home we moved the new pots of plants out near where the bird feeders are, and not 20 minutes later there was a honeybee on the heather. No kidding. March 3rd. Sweet! Bee garden looks like it will be a success.

I bought some more seeds, and found this wonderful invention...seed tape. It's biodegradable paper tape with the seeds already in it and spaced appropriately. How cool is that? Those little fiddly seeds always end up being a mess for me, and having an easy planting system like that would be a really back saver. I also bought 16 asparagus plants, which I plan to put with the rhubarbs in a perennial vegetable bed (never even considered the need for one of those until now). When I got home I also put up a new birdfeeder, got Todd to put up the greenhouse, did some pruning, and investigated a few plants I wasn't sure would overwinter. All of the plants seem to have survived even our extra-deep-freeze this year!