The Awakening Month!
March is not showing any signs of warming up and neither is London Honey HQ, so we're pulling ourselves through with dreams of wild flower meadows. We're partial to a bit of guerilla gardening so we thought we'd have a bash at making our own seed bombs. Now I've mentioned the b word we'll probably get picked up by the secret services - but it's bee friendly flower power we want to spread not war! The seed bomb seems to capture the imagination more than a pack of seeds and being encased in a nourishing blend of clay and peat free compost we feel the meadow seeds have a better chance of getting going in a bomb. You can either hurl your seed bomb towards it's desired growing spot for the full feeling of being a botanical revolutionary, it'll break up on impact, or crumble it up and pat it down slightly onto the soil.
The seed mix contains over twenty types of flowers so I'm excited to see which seeds come up in my patch. To name just a few there's Wild Carrot, Meadow Buttercup, Bladder Campion, Sorrel and Cowslip. With such variety there are flowers good not only for honey bees but for the bumble bees & solitary bees. It's partly about tongue length you see, if the bee's tongue (actually called a probosis) is too short for the particular flower it can't reach the nectar - bit like trying to reach that last bit of ice-cream in a narrow sundae glass if the spoon's not long enough. Plus the flowers will be staggered across spring and summer to provide for bees for longer.
If you want a guide to gardening for the little ladies then we are enjoying "Plants for Bees" by Kirk and Howes. It covers honey bees, bumble bees and solitary bees and includes edible plants and trees. The positive thing about Spring being slow to kick off is there is time to catch up on gardening plans! Our homemade bee bombs are currently only available direct from us on a Saturday at Spa Terminus.
toodle pip
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