Sensory Garden Bee Banquet
As you may be aware there’s been a major project taking place on the farm throughout the summer months to upgrade the Dale Farm bee hives, and train up some of the staff and volunteers to help look after the bees, so we can eventually improve our honey production as well as educating the people we support about the wonderful world of bees.
With this in mind, we decided to use this year’s planting in the bottom bed of the sensory garden to create a ‘bee-banquet’, packed full of plants and flowers that would appeal to our buzzy friends. We planted columns of sweet peas, bronze fennel and verbena bonariensis, as well as liquorice-scented agastache (giant hyssop), echium (viper’s bugloss), achillea (yarrow) and cosmos, all of which are loved by bees. The apple mint and pineapple mint that were planted the previous year were allowed to produce flowers, which are still providing plenty of nectar and pollen even as we go into the autumn months. We also have hellebores and primulas in this bed, which will provide a useful food source in late winter and early spring as hungry insects emerge from their over-wintering.
A lot of the planting already in the sensory garden had been chosen to attract pollinators, including all types of bees, hover flies, butterflies and moths. In the other two beds you’ll find a variety of different types of lavender – French, which flowers in late Spring, plus early and late flowering English lavender, which means there’s a constant source of food for our insect visitors from April through until October. Around these plants we’ve grown the long-flowering geranium Rozanne, scabious and nepeta, as well as herbs such as sage, oregano, marjoram and savoury. Once again the herbs have been allowed to produce flowers which the insects absolutely love, as well as meaning they can self-seed around the beds and create even more plants.
Sometimes when we’re working in the sensory garden we’ll just pause for a few moments and watch the numerous different types of bees on the main lavender patch, comparing their sizes, shapes and colours. It’s an extremely relaxing as well as fascinating activity, and anyone who would like to visit the sensory garden next summer is very welcome to join in!
Written by Allie Abraham
