Another Bee Site

Above, California poppy is one of the plants recommended at the Urban Bee Garden site. California poppy is native in California and can be grown easily from seed in many other parts of North America. It will grow in extremely poor soil, in fact is good for naturalizing along a roadside. But it does seem to need a lot of sun. Like Cosmos, which also is recommended for pollinators and is easy to grow from seed, it tends to reseed itself from year to year.

WHILE I WAS WORKING ON PART II of my history of native plants and gardening, among the sites that googled up was Urban Bee Garden: A Practical Guide to Introducing the World's Most Prolific Pollinators to Your Garden, sponsored by the Urban Bee Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The site includes a good overview of bee gardening and two lists of bee plants. The short list of easy-to grow plants includes these favorites of mine, which will grow almost anywhere: sunflowers, cosmos, California poppy, pincushion flower, penstemons (need sun and good drainage), lavender (not all varieties are equally hardy), lamb's ear, Coreopsis, buckwheat (good cover crop), catnip, and borage. For those who want to dig deeper (so to speak), the site also offers a nine-page .pdf file containing details on both native and nonnative plants and their appeal to honeybees and California bees.

What Type of Seed Should You Put in Those Feeders?

Above, black-oil sunflower seed, shown at the top of the photo, is the birdseed of choice for feeders that are above the ground. Cracked corn, shown at the bottom of the photo, is a good choice for birds such as doves, pheasants, and quail, and should be scattered on the ground.

For information on how to buy a bird feeder, click here.

DIFFERENT BIRDS HANG OUT IN DIFFERENT RESTAURANTS. In other words, different birds have different styles of eating and prefer different types of food. Some, like doves, sparrows, juncos, pheasants, and quail, prefer to eat on the ground rather than from a feeder that's suspended above the ground. They also tend to enjoy cracked corn and millet.

On the other hand, birds such as chickadees, nuthatches, and finches, like to visit feeders that are suspended above ground. Fortunately for those of us who prefer to keep our bird feeding activities as simple as possible, all of these birds seem to enjoy black-oil sunflower seed. In fact, studies show that black-oil sunflower seed is the favorite food of chickadees and nuthatches, two species that are widespread and universally loved.

So the easiest and most cost-efficient way to fill feeders is to buy black-oil sunflower seed in quantity, store it in a dry place (a metal garbage can works well if the seed is stored where rodents might get to it), and use it in all the feeders.

Why is black-oil sunflower seed so popular with these small birds? The seeds are small and have a thin shell, making them easy to eat. They are also very nutritious.

The seed is also a good choice for you, the person who is earning the money to buy the seed for these little guys. Black-oil sunflower seed keeps well, and it's inexpensive compared to some other seeds such as niger thistle (aka nyger). What's more, there don't seem to be any major environmental concerns around growing sunflowers for seed; in fact, sunflowers are North America's only native agricultural crop. Most of the crop is used to make oil for human use; the seeds that are designated for birds are those that are not of good enough quality to be used for oil.

Now, black-oil sunflower seed is more expensive by the pound than many birdseed mixes you might find in grocery stores, but in practice it probably is cheaper to use because there's less waste. When mixes are offered in feeders, birds tend to pick through the seeds, looking for the ones they like best. The seeds they don't care for are dropped on the ground, where they can make a mess or attract rodents.

Seed on the ground also attracts birds such as sparrows and juncos. But it's best not to encourage these birds to eat right underneath your feeders. (Think about it--it's not very hygienic!) All in all, the best strategy is to buy one type of seed for the feeders and, if you want to feed ground-feeding birds, buy them some seed of their own.

I usually buy black-oil sunflower in quantity for the feeders and keep it in a metal garbage can on the porch. For the ground-feeding birds, I buy both cracked corn and an inexpensive mix that is predominantly composed of millet (those round, shiny, off-white little seeds) but also has a bit of sunflower seed in it. This appeals to a wide variety of ground-feeding birds, including the pheasants we get around here. (When I lived on the West Coast, the same strategy attracted whole families of California quail.) Food for ground-feeding birds is scattered right on the driveway, away from the hanging feeders.

Coming soon: How to set up a bird feeding station.

Catching Up

Above: A sunflower volunteered among my monkshoods last year. These small sunflowers pop up all over the place because I use the seeds in my feeders, and the birds and squirrels spread them all around. Both sunflowers and monkshoods (Aconitum spp.) are excellent bee plants.

I HAVEN'T BEEN POSTING AS OFTEN AS I'D LIKE to this blog. Partly it's because, after an unusually cool, rainy spring and early summer, we are now having warmer temperatures and high humidity. I have trouble sleeping in warm weather, to say nothing of nights like last night--when, honestly, my sheets felt as though I had washed them and forgot to put them through the drier. This leaves me lazy and more than a little dazed during the day.

The effect on the garden has been, first, to create an explosion of weeds. Areas that I weeded a few weeks ago are already getting weedy again. Even mulch, my standby both for holding back weeds and for retaining moisture in the soil, doesn't seem to be doing a particularly good job on the weed front this year: The weeds are either coming up through it or seeding themselves into it. Meanwhile, however, growth in the vegetable garden has been stunted. One crop of spinach stayed small and yellowish; then on the first day that we had any sun, it all went to seed. Another crop, planted earlier in the season, did deliver one big bag of large, edible leaves. But I'm going to have to try to plant a fall crop if I want to get anything for the freezer. The cherry tomato plants are all quite small, and I don't hold out much hope for a big crop even though, in general, cherry tomato plants are a lot more reliable than the regular varieties. The scarlet runner beans, which I plant more for the hummingbirds than for food, are also stunted: They've grown only about a foot and a half, and hardly deserve the name "runner" at all!

The only annual plants that look as though they might still be a success story are the sunflowers. I plant a variety of these every year for the bees and the birds, and because I love to watch them grow. in addition, I put black oil sunflower seeds in my feeders, and so a certain number of seeds are spread about by birds and squirrels. About a week or so ago, the sunflowers I planted finally seemed to take off.

Though I seem to be falling into a summer doldrum, I do have a list of topics I want to write about soon. With luck I will be inspired by the sunflowers, and find some new energy as we move into late summer.