In 2019, I wrote a post about growing a “Bee Garden,” a patch of flowering plants that provides food for bees and other pollinating insects. The point was to bring them in and keep them around such that they would also pollinate my nearby vegetables and fruit trees.
It’s been 7 years. How does my Bee Garden look today? And has it been effective?
Today, it is less colorful and it has fewer types of plants, I must admit. Initially, I had sown many seeds of annual flowering plants like cosmos, sunflowers, and tansy phacelia. They filled in the spaces between small, new perennial flowering plants. And they provided lots of different shapes and colors. But now the perennials have grown big and filled in all the gaps and I have not continued sowing annual flowers.
Today, the plants that remain are coast sunflower, white sage, oregano, buckwheat, ceanothus, and lavender.
This reduction of diversity was my intention from the outset, actually. I hoped to have the patch filled with more permanent plants that covered the entire area of ground so that no space was wasted and so that few weeds would have room to grow. I didn’t want to allocate too much time throughout the year to sowing new seeds and weeding.
So in a sense, the Bee Garden has succeeded in this respect even though I miss the spectrum of colors that came from the many annual flowers of the first years.
Another of my goals was to have flowers all year long in order to keep pollinators present all year long. I don’t get this, however, not quite. I do get flowers covering most months though.
Coast sunflowers start the year in early winter, then ceanothus in late winter and early spring, then lavender in early spring too. White sage in late spring to early summer, then oregano and buckwheat most of summer and fall.
I do no irrigation. That was another goal I hoped to reach: flowers without irrigation. Committing to that goal has meant that some of the plants get brown and unattractive in late summer and fall.
Has my Bee Garden been effective?
Although it is not possible for me to judge conclusively whether this Bee Garden has increased the pollination of my vegetables and fruit trees, I can say that the nearby fruit trees have had mostly good crops over the past 7 years so it doesn’t seem to have hurt anything.
More than that, I can say for sure that the numbers and diversity of bees and other pollinators that I see in the area are higher than before. Part of that is likely that the Bee Garden provides food for them. Part of that is also likely that I have provided more homes for some of them to raise their babies; I have a few “bee hotels” or “native bee nesting blocks” near the Bee Garden.
Overall, my Bee Garden is not as pretty as it once was, but it is in a form that I can sustain, and I still love to visit and hover over it to see who is buzzing and zipping around — and zipping over to my nearby avocado flowers as well.
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