Every year I post about pollinators, and it’s always a thinly disguised excuse to post pictures of poppies. So this year I will just say again that planting flowers that bees like is one of the kindest things that you can do for them, and there is no flower that bees like more than the common Shirley poppy. Buy a packet of seed in late winter, sprinkle it over fertile ground while the weather is still cold, water regularly, and in late May or early June the show starts. I have started planting a bed of carrots in early March, then sprinkling the poppy seeds over the planted bed. You can’t see it in this picture, but underneath the poppies are carrots, and they are growing quite happily. So it is quite possible to get a crop of flowers for the bees and for your viewing pleasure, and still harvest food from the same bed. After they bloom the poppies die back and the carrots can take over, or if you gave the flowers the bed to themselves, you can dig up the bed at that point and plant something else.
The last few weeks have been filled with work obligations, sad things in the news, and a friend’s urgent medical issue, but I have tried hard to pause and notice the poppy bed every time I walk past it, and listen to the humming of the bees inside the blossoms. Poppies in June are a good reminder that we too are in bloom only a short time and need to revel in our time in the sun.
My urban homestead 