Bee Gardens. How do you create a garden that attracts bees? For the maximum punch year round there are three gardens you should consider growing:
Naturalized Garden
First, create a Native Wildflower Garden. Find a corner of the yard to use as a meadow of mixed plants of varying heights and shapes. Near it, keep a small mud puddle of swallow water. If possible, naturalize violets, clover and dandelions into your yard near the vegetable garden. Your cucumbers, melons and squash, plants that need a lot of pollination to produce healthy fruit, will thrive.
- Beardtongue, Penstemon – Southeast
- Mountain Mint, New England Aster – Northeast
- Lanceleaf, Milkweed – Midwest
- Blanket Flower, Native Salvia – Southwest
Let the garden take care of itself. Leaving it undistributed through winter creates an friendly winter habitat.
Flower Garden
Second, build a Flower Garden. Create a bed of well drained soil and plant a variety of annuals and perennials. Plant them in swatches with a variety of single-bloom and daisy like flowers. Colorful yellow, white and blue flowers are a big hit with bees. Coneflower, asters, sunflowers, poppies and Black-eyed-Susan’s are good choices. For fall gardens, plant annuals such cosmos, sunflower, and calendula.
Herb Gardens
Third, use a sunny spot to plant prolific blooming herbs. Plant them in mounds, keeping your ground-covering herbs like thyme separate from the taller herbs like rosemary. Mints, rosemary, lavender, sage, bee-balm and cilantro are good choices. Mints can become over-power a garden, so keep them in a spot for easy harvesting.
Thriving Bee Garden Recipe: Grow natives. Stir in a mix fragment herbs with splashes of yellow, white and blue, single-bloom daisy-like flowers. Add a dab of mud puddle. Keep the natives happy and spare a few dandelion and clover in your yard.
🍀FREE NATIVE PLANT POSTERS, BY SOIL TYPE🍀
Happy Gardening!
Resources:
Bee Pollinators Books By Heather Holm
Attracting Pollinators To Your Garden Using Native Plants, U.S. Forest Service
Garden Scoops 