Bee Friendly Gardener

20/07/2025

Pollinator friendly Sunday

10/07/2025

Developing a customer's
redundant veg bed into a pollinator-friendly one.

03/07/2025

Here are a couple of close-ups showing our small solitary bees nesting habits. The tubes are, in this case, hollow plant stems of varying diameters. I use dried dried reeds or iris stems for the smaller ones. The one the bee is entering is about 5mm and the sealed one below is only 3mm. Different bees will use a mixture of saliva, plant sap or tree resin to seal up their nests and use tiny pieces of grit or brick dust to camouflage them. Even tiny woodworm holes are used by the smallest bees, those that you might think are small flies but are actually some of the 250 types of these bees. Some of you will be familiar with the type of bee "hotels" sold in garden centres. These tend to have larger diameter tubes and are most likely to be used by mason bees which use wet mud to seal their nests of leafcutter bees which use pieces of leaves that they cut and collect.

01/07/2025

Latest shot of new pollinator bed. Verbena bonariensis and tall Scabious both in full bloom.

21/06/2025

Finally had the opportunity to visit the one and only John Little's amazingly innovative Hilldrop garden in Essex earlier today. His garden is dedicated to increasing biodiversity by the use of a variety of substrates from the waste industry, including crushed brick,concrete and ceramics. Extensive use of sand and deadwood and and very little flat surfaces mean that a wide variety of solitary bees use the site This garden has inspired recent work in some Chelsea show gardens and the Knepp estate's Wild Garden. Much of the hard landscaping are prototypes of items that his company makes and installs in public venues.
John is now overseeing a new charity called Care Not Capital hoping to inspire the use of gardeners in public spaces rather than expensive projects that never get maintained after their initial heralded installation.

15/06/2025

And a couple more from my garden : Helenium 'Sahin's Early Flowerer' and the scabious-like Cephalaria gigantea.

13/06/2025

Heucheras are generally grown for their attractive foliage but their small flowers are very popular with bumblebees. Here interplanted with Gaillardia,still to flower, another bee magnet.

13/06/2025

The new pollinator bed on June 14th, alliums have finished and now Purple Toadflax in flower with Verbena bonariensis just starting and Scabiosa Caucasian still to come

12/06/2025

More bee-friendly plants flowering in June. The yellow perennial foxglove (Digitalis lutea) and Astrantia (think variety is 'Roma').

31/05/2025

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no.25 (Eastry Village News June/July 2025)
So after two wet springs, this year we are in two month mini-drought. And the almost continuous breeze has made keeping young plants and seedlings watered a bit of a chore. I already have 12 empty water butts.
The colony of Snakeshead fritillaries only increased from 54 to 56 flowers despite the wet year but there are plenty of small self-sown seedlings still to mature. They can take about 5 years from seed to the first flower. In our small meadow area, we inherited a group of 7 cowslips. By 2023 this had jumped up to 14 but only 3 flowered last year. They have increased back up to 8 again this year but asking advice online suggested that having them in a long grass area was depriving them of the light they require to mature so I will change the mowing regime for them. This is year five for the meadow project and the amount of wildflowers has increased substantially with only a few introductions from me. Yellow Rattle, the hemi-parasitic annual has really got established and is noticeably knocking back the vigour of the surrounding grasses. The most numerous beneficiary is Wild Carrot which was seeded onto the area in 2021. Ox-eye Daisies which often dominate meadows is still struggling to increase. Cuckoo Flower, which is a damp meadow species, has made its first appearance with two young plants. The long-term dream would be for orchids to turn up but that will requires their dust-like seeds to blow in from the A256 and they may then require a certain type of mycorrhizal fungi to be present in the soil.
Some of the young trees have put on a couple of metres of growth now and are starting to impact the overall feel of the garden and the mixed native hedgerow planted in February 2021 has reached the top of the neighbouring boundary fence and has thickened up nicely. A nestbox on that fence had been unused for the previous four years while exposed but is now in use by a pair of Blue T**s.
Hedgehog activity has increased as well this spring. I had put down their decline to clearance work that had taken place in the Eastry Court Farm site prior to its sale but the nighttime trail camera recorded a probable five different ‘hogs one particular night in April so either some individuals have moved into the area or there has been some successful breeding locally.
Three large Leylandii have been removed from a neighbour’s garden in the past two weeks and has allowed a lot of light back into a part of the garden that we haven’t done much with so we now have another bed to develop. It is north-facing so will be planted as a woodland glade type area.

Jeff, the Bee-Friendly Gardener. You can find this and my previous articles on my Bee Friendly Gardener page should you wish to share or comment.

30/05/2025

Flowering right now in my bee-friendly garden

20/05/2025

https://www.buglife.org.uk/bugs/solitary-bee-week/

90% of bee species are solitary bees and along with other pollinating animals their hard work is responsible for at least one in every three mouthfuls we eat. However, like many species, they are under threat and need our help.