UBC Farm: My Favorite Place to Be in October

Beautiful pumpkins are waiting for you at UBC Farm. Make sure you head there this weekend to get yours.

An Eastern Interloper, this bumblebee has escaped from a greenhouse.

 No more flowers on the snowberry bushes. This signals the end of the native bee year here in Vancouver. You'll see honeybees foraging, but very few native bees if any at all.

Yarrow acts as a benificial plant next to crops attracting predators of the crop-eating bugs. It does tend to spread, and has deep roots, so in a smaller garden is needs to be reigned in. It's perfect for naturalizing into lawns and no-mow zones.

Bee plants can have other functions besides providing pollinators with nectar and pollen. Here's an example of intercropping kale with clover as a living mulch. (I'm not sure what that weed is at the bottom of the photo.)

Note to self: a trap crop is a crop that attracts pests away from the main cash crop. Catch crops like this phacelia and crimson clover catch nutrients and hold them in the soil in between the main cash crops.