Double-dipping in the garden with blooms
The gardening experience is best when it serves multiple purposes, like fruiting plants that attracts pollinators when they are in flower.
Everyone, it seems, wants to serve the pollinating community of bugs, bees, hummingbirds and songbirds by planting more flowering plants. And why not? More than 30 per cent of our food plants are pollinated by nature. The more we encourage the “good guys” in the garden, the better for all of us, including the farmers who grow much of our food.
The benefits of providing an assist to your local pollinators are not limited to the space within your property or balcony. Fact is, the bee who visits your borage is just as likely to fly up the road to a raspberry farm on the same day. Honeybees will travel up to 16 kilometres in one day as they forage for pollen and nectar.
For gardeners who want the best of both worlds, a plant that produces flowers and food, consider planting flowering food plants.
For a succession of blooms that produce munchies of one kind or another, consider our list: Spring flowering edibles. Apples, pears, plums, cherries: virtually all tree fruits bloom in May and early June. If you plant ornamental fruits that don’t bear fruit, like purple leafed plum or Japanese Cherries, avoid double flowering varieties as they are hard for most pollinators to access. Too many petals inhibit the journey to the pollen.
Early flowering berries include currants, strawberries and blackberries. Early summer: Asparagus, borage, coriander, chives, bush beans, peas, peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins (all members of the squash family) and autumn fruiting raspberries. Mid summer:
Borage, marjoram, nasturtiums (eat the flowers for a peppery flavour), runner beans, oregano, mint, thyme and rosemary.
Late summer/early fall: Nasturtiums, runner beans, borage and sunflowers (eat the seeds).
Note that borage appears on list for every season except early spring. It produces one of the most sought-after flowers by foraging pollen collectors. Borage honey is lighter and sweeter than what you’re used to.
Also, on the list but easy to overlook are sunflowers. Their bright sunny faces are frequently visited by pollinating native bees and honeybees. They bloom for an extended period and then the seeds are set and ready for harvest. You can always just leave them for songbirds to feed on. The sound of foraging adult finch and their young squeaking away using their two-note song will stay in your head all winter. It becomes a useful reminder of sunnier days in the garden. Flower to plant ratio. When you plant, look for heavy flowering edibles that provide a high flower-plant ratio. Cherry tomatoes and borage (once again) fit the bill nicely.
Mixing up varieties that bear fruit at different times also helps to support the pollinating community. Plant July bearing raspberries and September/October bearing varieties to spread out the flowering times and harvest. Ever-bearing strawberries provide similar benefits. Hotels.
Once pollinators are fed, provide habitat and water for your beneficial insects. A shallow dish filled with pebbles for insect to perch on as they drink works well. Butterflies prefer to suck water from mud, which is why you often find them at the beach.
Most of our veggie crops will go to seed if we leave them long enough. Radishes and mesclun mix will shoot up a flower which matures in a few days into a cluster of seeds. If you have an excess crop, why not let it flower?
Rhubarb will also bolt to bloom. We generally recommend that you cut the flower off, as the bloom diverts energy from leaf production next year. However, this late in the season it won’t hurt the plant to produce a few blooms.
Mark sows peanuts each season for this reason. Members of the pea family, they have attractive bright orange flowers for a couple of weeks each August. Not only are home grown peanuts a real treat when roasted in the oven, the flowers are a novelty that almost no visitor can identify – except, of course, the pollinators. Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster, tree advocate and Member of the Order of Canada. His son Ben is a fourth-generation urban gardener and graduate of University of Guelph and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Follow them at markcullen.com, @markcullengardening, and on Facebook.