The Bee Kind Challenge Step 1
Planting a Bee Friendly Borage Pot and Discovering the Power of Flowers.
Today we are celebrating Bees’ Needs Week by sharing our number one way to help bees - planting flowers that are nutrient rich and provide them with pollen and nectar in abundance.
If you are a beginner, planting annual seeds that quickly flower and can easily be grown in pots is a great place to start.
For a shortcut, look for the bee or pollinator symbols on seed packets, or look for native wildflower seeds, or bee friendly seed bombs. Or simply plant a herb garden full of lavender, rosemary, borage and thyme. The bees will love it.
Whatever your space there is a plant that will fit, many pollinator friendly plants grow happily in pots and on window ledges, for example the wonderful borage plant, our favourite bee positive plant of all. Bees absolutely love it, as do our cats who nibble the edible flowers.
To plant your own bee-friendly borage pot you will need:
Borage seeds - for alternative seed suggestions see our free planting seeds of hope guide
Compost
A seed tray or empty juice/milk cartons with drainage holes cut in the bottom.
Instructions:
Fill your seed tray or carton with compost ¾ full. Water and let the compost swell and get moist allowing excess water to drain away through drainage holes. Make a small hole about ½ cm deep and drop a single borage seed into it. Cover the seed with a sprinkle of compost and place on a sunny window ledge to germinate. Water again when the compost starts to dry out, probably every 3 or 4 days. Your borage seedling will germinate in approximately 10 days.
You can plant borage seeds directly outdoors after frost but the seedlings can be susceptible to slugs and snails when they are young so we like to start ours off indoors on the window ledge.
Plant your borage seedlings out when they are about 4 weeks old either directly into your garden or into pots.
Borage is so beloved by bees it’s folk name is Bee Bread! Bees adore borage because they love blue flowers but also because borage flowers refill with nectar within two minutes. Many flowers take 24 hours to replenish their supply of nectar so this makes borage a great pollinator-friendly plant for small gardens or containers.
The Celtic name for borage, borrach, translates as “courage”. Celtic warriors used to drink wine infused with borage to give them courage before battle. The ancient Greeks and Romans also believed borage invoked courage. Today borage seed oil is highly prized both as a health supplement and as an ingredient in organic skincare because of it’s high gamma linoleic acid (GLA) content. It’s thought that this fatty acid can help reduce inflammation.
Planting flowers is the best way to help the bees but did you know that flowers can positively impact your mental health too?
A new study into viewing flower images published in the Journal of Environmental Sciences examined the recovery effects from flowers after psychological stress and found that simply viewing a flower image reduced negative emotion, blood pressure and cortisol levels.
This is quite extraordinary given our long traditions of bringing flowers to hospitals, and including them in our rituals and celebrations of life and death.
So planting flowers might help more than the bees and spread a little happiness too.
Find out more about the relationship between nature and your mental health.
And in the meantime bee kind and please share on behalf of the bees (and others ) near you who might benefit from some flowers this summer.