Posts Tagged ‘Shirley poppies’

9 Jun

Annual Pollinator Post

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, passing pleasures. Tagged: , , , .

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.

21 Jun

The Bee Banquet

Posted by wooddogs3 in front yard gardening, passing pleasures, urban farm animals. Tagged: , , , , , .

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Surely everyone knows by now about the bee/pollinator crisis, and all I plan to mention here is that we gardeners can do a bit to maintain the bees that we have left. If you want your fruit trees and squash to bear, then bees are a personal issue for you, and the best things that you can do for them are garden without any insecticide sprays (the drift from which can spread a long way and is very toxic to bees) and feed them. This year I’ve managed to keep a succession of plants blooming that are attractive to bees, but by far their favorite is the common Shirley poppy, available in nearly every seed catalog. While the weather is still cold, scatter the fine tiny seed around in spots where the poppies can get big and bushy in midsummer, keep the area watered and weeded, and let them do their effulgently gorgeous thing. I scatter the seeds around my tomato bed in late winter, they hog the bed in June, and then can be pulled out after blooming to give the tomatoes breathing room. Every morning they lift my spirits twice: first when I catch sight of them and again when I get closer and hear the continual hum of bees working. I am thinking of getting a beehive so that the third thrill can occur when I see them filling combs.
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I should add that the leaves of Papaver rhoeas are edible in cooked greens mixtures, but they are no great shakes, so think of this plant as food for the bees, not you.