Radishes at Moberly: A Spicy Juicy Snack

What a beautiful day for grade threes and their buddies to garden at Moberly! Yesterday was all about radishes, as one of the beds had become covered with volunteers from last year's radish pods. (Volunteers are seeds that sprout without being sown directly by a gardener.) If we had more beds I would have one just for radishes, because they would just grow and seed without any help. However, we want to plant a variety of veggies, herbs and flowers.

This is a large radish plant that grew in the path. We're leaving it to flower for the bees. We'll just work around it! The flowers are edible too!

These are the small radish greens. The heart-shaped leaves (cotyledons) are delicious!

Here's the patch with small and medium radish plants. The medium leaves are fuzzy and not palatable until they are cooked. In wartime, people made radish soup to make sure that none of the plant was wasted. It's called "nose to tail" eating: chowing down on the root, the leaves and the flowers. Just remember to leave plenty of flowers for the bees. And thank you to my "worker bees" from Moberly Elementary.

P.S. I saw a hummingbird at the garden feeding on the borage flowers! But in my garden at home they love the salmonberry blossoms above all.

April Flowers Bloom at the Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre

 It's April, which means on sunny days we are gardening from dawn to dusk. And the bees are out!

These little native bees are lekking around the currants, snowberry, and ninebark. They are male bees with little furry faces looking for love. It has been ID'ed as an Andrena mining bee.

At noon I lay on my back watching the bees in the red flowering currants. A hummingbird also came by and sipped at the blossoms.

This mystery shrub attracted bumblebee queens.

The salmonberry has been blooming for weeks.

These are blackcurrant blossoms, which attracted a large Eastern Bumblebee queen.

  I put some grade one students to work giving the Moberly Bee Garden some TLC.

They made friends with worms and fed chafer beetle larvae to the waiting crows.

The Jarai gardeners planted out their seedlings.

And at the end of the day I needed a sweet reward: A caramel popcorn Sunday at Ernest Ice Cream!

Celebrating Pollen with Jasna Guy: ArtStarts Weekend Workshops

I was pleased to pitch in and help participants explore bees and pollen with a workshop devised and lead by Jasna Guy through ArtStarts. The results were fabulous!  And we got to celebrate the 20th birthday of ArtStarts four times!!!!

A Warm Spell in January

On Monday I saw the first honeybees of the year. It was 10 degrees at noon and the bees were checking our the flowers at two different florists. I felt sorry for the girls because it was slim pickings for pollen and nectar. One bee had ivory pollen on her hind legs, which may have come from the heather which is blooming. The sweet box is very fragrant these days and some of the the hellebores are blooming as well.

I am well on my way to ordering seeds for the new year. I'm very excited about trying some different kinds of poppies and zinnias and I've discovered some really interesting varieties of nigella to grow. If you are into flowers, I suggest two seed companies: Beauty Beyond Belief, which is based in the States has a good variety of wild flowers. I have had good service from the company. You can subscribe to their newsletter to keep tabs on their sales. Now that the Canadian dollar has dropped, it's also good value to order seeds from companies in Canada and I'm very excited about the flower seed offerings in William Dam Seeds based in Ontario. This is also a great time to order seeds for flowers, herbs and heirloom vegetables from my personal favorite, Salt Spring Seeds. As Dan Jason grows most of the seeds this is a good time of the year to order before the gardening season begins and Dan gets busy in the fields.

Keep your eyes on those snowdrops and crocuses because they'll be up and blooming before you know it!

A Trio of Early Spring Bee Flowers with White Blossoms

 This weekend I was lucky to be able to visit the HCP : Horticulture Centre of the Pacific on Vancouver Island. We had a lovely brunch at the Nourish café and then I took a quick stroll through the gardens. I discovered a couple of sweet early bee plants: a winter-blooming honeysuckle that attracts bees and hummingbirds called Lonicera standishii. It is originally from China and the corolla is short enough to provide nectar to early-emerging bees. (Be advised it can be invasive in some conditions.)

This fragrant Clematis armandii aka Old Man's Beard or Armand clematis was blooming profusely. I was very glad to see was a also lot of Indian plum (Oemleria cerasiformis) blooming along the roadsides, an important native source of nectar for orchard mason bees. These three plants would make enchanting additions to a white bee garden.