PLANTING FOR BEES

[Gregory_Naff]

DZE,
Bees work pecan tress and produce a very flavorful honey. (it makes an amazing mead).

I just found this site about a week ago and have spent the last couple of days catching up.

I am looking for a nice fall planting for about 2 acres. It needs to be low water use, but able to survive VERY base soil. Any suggetions?

[Robert Hawkins]

How about buckwheat?

http://www.seedland.com/Merchant/mer...Category_Code=

They say any soil.

Hawk

[Mabe]

David,

Call around to your garden centers right now and see if anyone has agastache to sell. Even one plant will get you stated nicely...it will bloom soon and then will seed all around itself. You can also spread the seed where you want it. I carry the stalks around my meadow and shake them as I walk.

I'll check some suppliers I use for seed and post the info.

As far as planting the seed, there are no special needs other than some open soil, a light cover of soil on top of the seeds, and water till the seedlings take off. They don't need coddling. Hope this helps.

[BULLSEYE BILL]

Here is an update on my little field of dreams.

I planted the field in three sections, the alfalfa did not fare well, between the aphids and the brome grass it turned out to be a waste of land use. I did start sowing the worst part of it into buckwheat. The buckwheat reseeded itself but it sprouted too early (or late) and froze leaving no seed for the next spring.

The Hubam white clover is an annual when planted here. It bloomed the first spring it was planted. The seed produced came up that fall and bloomed again but was too late in the season to produce seed and the next year there was almost no white clover. That fall I planted that area to harry vetch and had two good years of vetch until this year when the late Easter freeze killed it. Now I had two useless areas.

The third area where the yellow clover was (was being the optimum word) had been weakened by the planter (me) burning the field off of heavy ground cover, (mostly brome), two years ago in late winter. and the brome grass crowding the clover out. Again the late freeze killed any chance of having a bloom from any surviving clover.

The cure.

The coop told me last year that it would take two treatments of Roundup to kill out the brome grass. They treated last fall and the next application was this summer, (should have been spring but that is another story). The field had been totally killed and sat dead for one month. This weekend I burned off all the weeds and hopefully the weed seeds too. Then the field was disced and surprisingly it worked up very well.

Next weekend I will plant twice, once with buckwheat and harry vetch using a standard seed drill, and then planting yellow clover with a grass drill rented from the soil conservation district.

My hope is that there is enough time for the buckwheat to come up and make a fall crop for the bees to pack away for winter stores while the vetch and clover should come up and get enough growth to make bloom set next year.