[Fleecewife]

  <<< http://beekind.bumblebeeconservation.org/finder >>>

Bumble Bee Conservation has made an interactive thingy to help you to find out how bee friendly your garden plantings are.  Once you've got your score there are lists of other possibles you could grow.  Worth a look

                       


I scored 5,214, where 5,500 is an excellent score, so I've a bit to go yet.   Their recommendations for me included Mahonia for winter nectar - but I hate it    I'll get Viburnum instead.
I'm not sure just how many bees of any kind are likely to be flying in the middle of winter up here, but I suppose I'll not find out if I don't give them a nectar source.

[Carse Goodlifers]

Scores on the board - 3544
A bit to go then  but I thought our garden was not too bad given that when we moved in it was all grass and so all the planting has been done in the last 2 yrs.  I think my score is very respectable.

......Their recommendations for me included Mahonia for winter nectar - but I hate it    I'll get Viburnum instead.......

 
Same here fleecewife - I got the 2 of them recommended along with pussy willow, cotoneaster and some annuals.

Great site though 

[Fleecewife]

A score of 3544 for 2 years of planting seems pretty good to me  . 

Another recommendation for me is Ceanothus - I do like that, but it doesn't like 1000 feet of howling wind, snow, frosts, heavy rain etc.  I have tried but.........

[Caroline1]

I was expecting terrible and got 1137 which is actually higher than I thought it would be. Have been there 1 year and focused on the animals and fruit/veg growing last year. Next year going to focus on the flowers as my poor beehive did struggle this year and have had to feed them.

Good to get some more ideas of what to plant.

[Carse Goodlifers]

A score of 3544 for 2 years of planting seems pretty good to me  ..........

Thankyou Fleecewife.  Looking at it, it is good.  A couple of garden centres have had a really good couple of years of business from me - various deals on herbaceous perennials e.g. 5 plants for £12 (4 in square pots) and plants from the reduced section - picked up a couple of hosta's the other week for £1 each - all the foliage had died back and the store wont want to overwinter them on their premises so they reduce them.

The herb peren's grow like stink in the first year that they have been planted and I don't mind if it takes them 2 or 3 years to get up to a decent size of plant.

I'm more than happy to help the buzzers out there 

[Fleecewife]

I was expecting terrible and got 1137 which is actually higher than I thought it would be. Have been there 1 year and focused on the animals and fruit/veg growing last year. Next year going to focus on the flowers as my poor beehive did struggle this year and have had to feed them.

Good to get some more ideas of what to plant.

I don't think that's a bad score at all Caroline    There's plenty of time to build up your flowering plants over the next few years.  When we first moved here about 20 years ago, we wondered about keeping hive bees.  In the end the fact that there were quite simply no visible flowers in the area meant we didn't get any.  Now we have seen the plight of our bumble bees, solitary bees and so on, we concentrate on supporting them.  I think there's very little difference between what you grow for honey bees and what you grow for bumbles.  Some flowers take too much weight to open them for honey bees to get in, and they have different length sucky bits but I think a decent range should cope with all.

All our bees are either dead for the winter, or hibernating now.  They tend to emerge later here than further south, so I don't think it would be worth planting the mahonia even if I did like it, because our bees are still asleep when it flowers.

I think the bumble bees have had three good years now, after some awful years, so numbers are back up.

There are various veggies bees love of course.  Our broad bean flowers are always dripping with bees, and smell lovely too.  All the spring fruit blossom is popular, runner beans, squashes and of course leek and brassicas which have been allowed to go to seed.

One brilliant flower I grow in with the veggies is helichrysum, which has bees, butterflies and hoverflies positively swooning over any I let open fully.

[Fleecewife]

A score of 3544 for 2 years of planting seems pretty good to me  ..........

Thankyou Fleecewife.  Looking at it, it is good.  A couple of garden centres have had a really good couple of years of business from me - various deals on herbaceous perennials e.g. 5 plants for £12 (4 in square pots) and plants from the reduced section - picked up a couple of hosta's the other week for £1 each - all the foliage had died back and the store wont want to overwinter them on their premises so they reduce them.

The herb peren's grow like stink in the first year that they have been planted and I don't mind if it takes them 2 or 3 years to get up to a decent size of plant.

I'm more than happy to help the buzzers out there 

You can spend an absolute fortune at nurseries    If you can get reduced plants, brilliant, or plants which could be divided straight away, so instead of one plant you have say three slightly smaller ones which will have bulked up by next year.  Then once they are established you can divide them again.  My monarda plant has now given birth to many clumps, greatly loved by bees, and such a lovely colour.  Marjoram is a lovely herb which can be dripping with bees when it's in flower, and it seems to seed itself all over the place - too much in fact if that's possible.
I am finding that the plants which do well here have now grown to such a size that they will have to be reduced back to neater plants.  This is especially so for my tiny alpines - I'll have to take cuttings - so tiny they are really fiddly.

Keep up the good work 

[waterbuffalofarmer]

I buy them as seeds and sow them myself. I sowed lavendar bushes and within 1 month i planted them out and 2 months later where nicely sized bushes. I think the variety was hidcote, if you're interested. Its cheaper i find to buy them as seeds, than bushes and of course you can sow as many as you want

[Fleecewife]

Definitely WBF.  I use a mix of seeds and bought perennial plants.  Our season here tends to be very short, so sometimes plants give a headstart over seeds, but often seeds are best.  Easy annuals for example, grow like wildfire, but they do compete for space on the bench against veggies if they need an early bit of warmth - I never buy veggie plants, as I love the part where they pop up out of the soil - that's the best bit of growing things for me  .
I always grow flowers such as annual rudbeckia, helichrysum, antirrhinum, sunflower, cornflowers, poppies and many more, from seed, some perennials too.
I have grown lavender but I get so many plants I end up giving them away!  My flower garden isn't particularly huge, so I don't have room for a whole load of the same species.
I also use quite a lot of bulbs, especially crocus and daffodils - I love them

What I have discovered over the years is that I sometimes struggle to overwinter biennial and perennial seed grown plants in the first year.  There's no point planting them out the first autumn, so they have to overwinter in the polytunnel, but even in there the temp goes down to minus 12 or 13.  For those plants, buying them in is best.