The Birds and the Bees
21.08.2023 - 11:38
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
I wrote last month about my lack of gardening mojo, and it hasn’t come back. I don’t blame it, the weather has been dismal! Barely a whiff of sunshine. The news that a dry February is a harbinger of drought later this year sealed the deal for me; I’m not going to attempt a vegetable garden this year. I’ve planted the two beds of potatoes that I had chitting, and my pepper seedlings are coming along, but that’s it for annual vegetables. I’m turning over the other empty beds to flowers for the bees and other wildlife.
Ryan and I had already started work on turning the front garden into a wildlife patch. There are three low raised beds, and Ryan has sown scarlet clover and micro clover around those, and it’s just starting to come up now. We’ve put the bird feeder in the middle bed, where it’s attracting tits (including lovely long-tailed tits), finches and the occasional woodpecker. The robins, sparrows and blackbirds dart around underneath, hovering up any leftovers. We’ve catered for the squirrels by moving their feeder onto the fence, next to the small plum tree. We’ve identified at least two individuals who use it.
Yesterday, Ryan and I sowed a mix-and-match collection of wildflower seeds into the raised beds in the front garden. We’d been given some, and collected others. It will be interesting to see what comes up! The idea is to attract bees and butterflies alongside the birds.
In the long, hot and dry summer last year, the back garden went a bit wild. I’ve never had much luck growing borage where I want it, but for some reason last year it came up everywhere and turned the back garden into a borage forest. We couldn’t get too close to several of the raised beds for weeks, as they were constantly buzzing with bees.
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