Doing our bit to help the bees

While pottering around our inner-city garden, there's always some kind of background noise, whether it's merely traffic, neighbours talking, or local birds calling to one another. But the sound I enjoy the most is the hum of bees. 

A native blue-banded bee closes in on an eggplant flower.

Not only is it a happy sound but it's also a vital signal that our backyard garden is a safe place for bees and other insects to go about their work, and make a living. Doing the right thing by bees isn't rocket science. There's just two steps.
1. Plant bee-friendly flowering plants (and there are lots of them)
2. Stop using harmful insect sprays that kill bees and other beneficial insects.

Bees go mad when our lemon tree flowers, which it will do soon.

As spring is upon us here in Australia, and gardeners everywhere are thinking "what can I plant now", it's the perfect time to put in a plug for becoming a bit more bee-friendly, whether you're a balcony gardener, own a rambling country estate or, like Pam and me, have an ordinary suburban backyard.

Our poppies are blooming now, and bees almost bathe in the plentiful pollen.

Now, I've done numerous postings about bees over the years, and this latest one has been prompted by an email I received from Taronga Zoo (for out-of-towners, Taronga Zoo is Sydney's largest and oldest zoo, situated on the edge of Sydney Harbour — visiting Taronga is a part of most Sydney childhoods. It was certainly part of mine, with countless visits there). 

It might come as a surprise to some to know this, but Taronga Zoo cares for its bees in the same way it does for all its other creatures — with loving devotion. This Sydney winter has been very dry indeed — there's a drought on — and so flowers are fewer and life is tougher for Taronga's bee population (and all other bees in Sydney). One simple reason for looking after bees is that Taronga has its own vegie patch, to provide food for its animals, and as every vegie gardener knows, bees play a vital role in pollinating all sorts of crops.

Taronga's beekeeper inspects one of their hives.

What Taronga would like everyone in Sydney to do is simple: make your garden friendlier for bees. So here's some very basic tips on how to get started, but before I do that, I have to include this next photo, just to show you how popular beekeeping has become in Sydney. 

About 200m from my house, the roof of this corner shop in Marrickville is
very probably what my busy backyard bees called "Headquarters". And so
in doing my bit in the inner-city, I'm helping gourmets to be happy. 

Apart from following guideline number 2: "don't use harmful sprays", following guideline number 1: "plant bee-friendly plants" is very easy to do, because there are so many great plants to choose from. The basic rule is this: if it produces a flower, the bees will find it.

Flowering shrubs: lavender probably tops the list, but all daisies are fabulous, too. Shrubs such as abelia and buddleia are famous bee-attractors, but on a small scale little alyssum (sweet Alice) and nasturtiums do a great job, and so do my poppies. But all annual flowers are great for bees, and probably the perfect choice for smaller gardens and balconies. 

Natives: all the flowering native shrubs are brilliant bee magnets, but top choices would include hardenbergia, grevilleas (which come in all shapes and sizes), bottlebrush, westringia (coast rosemary, a very good hedging plant), and native daisies (Brachyscome). 

Herbs: most people think "foliage/leaves" when you say "herbs", but all herbs flower well and bees love them. Basil is terrific (and now is the time to plant some), but oregano, marjoram, sage, rosemary, mint, coriander and lemon balm all do a great job attracting bees. Borage is probably the star of the bee-friendly herb garden, as bees adore its plentiful blue flowers.

Flowering vegetable crops also attract (and need!) bees, especially tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, zucchini, cucumber, pumpkins, watermelons and squash. So my tip is to plant some low-growing flowers next to your vegie patch, such as alyssum, petunias, low-growing daisies, etc. It's what "potager" gardens are all about: mixing flowers, herbs and vegies together so they attract bees. And besides, potagers just look better.

My citrus trees (lemon, Tahitian lime, Thai lime) all attract stacks of bees, and spring is a great time to plant one, and it's also the perfect time to fertilise them. All other fruit trees are magnets for bees when they are in flower, so if your garden design needs a small tree, think about a fruit tree next time round.

While the name of this thing is a "birdbath" nobody told the bees they can't
visit, so I always make sure there is a gently sloping rock in my birdbath so
bees and other flying little guys can take a drink, especially on a hot day.

So there you go, head off to the garden centre on a "bee-friendly" mission, and help maintain your local honey supply. 

Finally, you can also test out my favourite bee theory: no matter where you put a flowering plant, bees will find it. Go on, plant something in an out-of-the-way spot and keep an eye on it. Once it starts flowering, our little busy, buzzing hard-workers will soon be all over it. That's what I love about bees ... they are so good at their jobs!

Summer panoramas

Lots of Sydney gardeners will tell you that we don't really have four distinct seasons here. We kind of spend most of the year in a lovely, mild warm season, then it gets cold for half a dozen weeks in the middle of the year, and horribly hot and humid for another half-dozen weeks around this New Year time of year. 

In the same sense, we also don't really have one particular "peak" season, as cool climate gardeners tend to enjoy each spring. We enjoy several little peaks every year, and right now, in the middle of the horribly humid and hot time, when we're almost tropical in every way, well-watered Sydney gardens go berserk. Which is what our garden is doing now. 

So here's three "panorama" style wider-angled photos of midsummer madness in Sydney. Hopefully if you click on each photo, it will come up a lot lot bigger.  

Using my iPhone's nifty "Panorama" function, this photo starts on the left with the rather ghostly looking sight of Spanish moss covering the bare branches of our recently carked-it ex-grevillea. On the left is a patch of cucumbers, chillies and assorted flowers. Big frangipani rear left, and on the right is a lemon tree, succulent patch, basil, Thai chilli, lots of geraniums and assorted others.

Taken from the other end of the path, this is the succulent patch, and beyond that are basil, shallots, geraniums behind, and mint bushes behind the geraniums. 

The dominating, broad-leafed thing in the left foreground is the "Cute Cucumber" which has spread far and wide, and produces about four or five new cucumbers to harvest every day. The yellow flowers are hardy marigolds, the white and reds and New Guinea impatiens, and the blue is salvia. Herbs include chives, garlic chives, thyme and the lovely big lemon grass in the background.

And so there you have it. A well-watered Sydney garden loving the heat. 

One handy tip right now for Aussie gardeners is to keep on watering pots well, especially on days when "a few showers" are forecast. Usually the showers do manage water the soil a bit, so you might not have to use the hose, but these light showers hardly do anything for potted plants, which can dry out amazingly fast in the summer heat. So I water my pots every day, unless it is truly pouring rain.

Being Co-operative

I'll have to be careful how I choose my words here. "I got us into this" is, I think, far superior to "It's all my fault". However you want to apportion blame or causality to the photograph below, it's certainly all my own work. We've joined a vegie co-op… for the next four weeks (filling in for friends who are travelling).

And here's the first Saturday morning pick-up. Thirty bucks' worth, all bought at the Sydney Markets in Flemington. Wouldn't have a clue how organic it is or not. And there's just two of us to eat it all. And a similarly large pair of boxes will hit our kitchen benchtop next Saturday. And the Saturday after that. And… oh dear!

Here's the checklist
• One large brown paper bag of button mushrooms. Some will go into tonight's baked chicken and rice dish, the rest will disappear into melted butter one day this week and end up as sidekick to a steak.
• Lots of carrots, but that's OK, as my adorable Pam is 20% rabbit (I suspect). Loves her carrots. And what she doesn't eat raw, I'll chop and cook tonight and other nights this week.
• Big bunch of celery, Pam to the rescue again. Crunch crunch crunch…  and what she doesn't eat raw, I'll chop and cook tonight, and other nights. Good sauce starter pack, carrot and celery.
• One bunch of shallots (green onions). Easy peasy. Some to disappear tonight. I can feel a stir-fry coming on for Wednesday.
• 2 eggplants (in season now). Easy peasyish, but we do already have some eggplant in the fridge, so our neighbour Katerina will probably enjoy one of these.
• 3 corn cobs (one goes into the baked chicken, the others will disappear easily enough)
• a kilo (at least) of Roma tomatoes (we know what to do with them, saucery here we come)
• 8 Valencia oranges (yummm… freshly squeezed OJ on Sunday morning)
• a dozen or more Imperial mandarins (in season, juicy, sweet and a bit fragrant; they're my special treat and will disappear soon enough)
• 10 Royal Gala apples, in season, juicy and crisp, another easy assignment, as we both work from home and like to snack on fruit
• big bunch of English spinach (pan-fry on Monday with raisins and pine nuts, touch of nutmeg, as a side dish, an old French favourite)
• And last and definitely least of all, one bag of that awful white-bleached garlic from China. The only disappointment in the box. They use chlorine to bleach their export garlic in China, then fumigate it with methyl bromide to kill any bugs. Yikes! That's about as un-organic as anything that's actually grown in the ground. We're giving that bag a miss.

Apart from the worrying garlic, everything else looks great. So, bursting with enthusiasm, we're confident of knocking this box off this week. But then there's next week, and the week after that. I'm glad all this bounty of co-operative boxes actually has a "finish-by" date.

I don't think we could keep this up for two months, let alone a year. But it's a delightful change for a couple of weeks. It'll probably change what we cook and what we eat in the next month, which isn't such a bad thing, even if our diet is already a varied and healthy one (well, most of the time).

Have you ever been in a vegie co-op, and how long did you last? Amazingly enough, this lovely bunch of people has been doing it for years, so I am told.

One glorious summer

Call me a sensitive petal if you like, but I'm always aware that when I grow and harvest vegies I am cutting these plants down in their prime, depriving them of their full lifespan. It doesn't really bother me, but it's always in the back of my mind, and so when I saw both of our chicory plants sending up spectacular flowering stems, I decided to let them grow on, flower and set seed, not only to see what happens, but also to collect the seed. And this morning we got the most delightful surprise.

This beautiful flower is a good, impressive size,
more than an inch across, and it's very pretty.
It's from the chicory plant with the superb cultivar
name of Cicoria Catalogna Puntarelle Brindisina.
It's a type with noticeably serrated, emerald leaves. 

This chicory has sent up multiple flower stems,
some curled weirdly, others fairly straight. Its next
door neighbour in the vegie bed, Cicoria Spadona,
has long paddle-shaped leaves, and its flower
spike has reached six feet in length, but no
flowers yet. Stay tuned for that event, folks.

These are the respective seed packets, bought here in
Australia from The Italian Gardener. 

The heat of summer is not a great time to be growing leafy greens in Sydney gardens, and planting new crops really should be delayed for another eight weeks or so, until things cool down a fraction. So, I'm getting my kicks right now just letting the existing spring plantings live out life to the full, spending one glorious summer flowering then setting seed, just like they did a zillion generations ago when they were the wild ancestors of these delicious kitchen garden cultivars. Somehow this thought appeals to me more than it rationally should. 

Is my soil healthy?

There was such an interesting letter in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning that I thought all vegetable growers who missed it might want to know what was said.

To set the scene briefly, last Saturday the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story entitled "Lead threat to children from home vegies", accompanied by a photo of backyard soil testing. The gist of the story was worrying, and probably confirmed the worries of many people, especially those in older inner-city areas. What's in the soil? Is there lead? Other dodgy chemicals from days gone by which still have a thousand years to go before they break down? Here's that story (click on the image and it should come up bigger if you are not reading this post via your email).

Then, this Tuesday morning, a letter from Emeritus Professor Brian Gulson of Macquarie University appeared, suggesting a less worrying interpretation of the "lead in soils" issue. Here's the professor's letter.

Hopefully you can read the professor's letter, but the gist of it is that lead in soils doesn't transfer easily into vegetables grown in those soils. He does mention that lead in the air can deposit on leafy vegies such as lettuce and spinach, but that good washing before cooking should remove that lead. He also goes on to conclude that "garden produce is not the problem" (with lead in children).

Living in an area on the edge of the inner-cty, I've always been interested in the health of my soil, and from simple historical research I know that my local area was farmland before it was turned into housing land. It was never industrial land. Readers of this blog in inner-city areas might have a different history of land use for their plot of ground.

While the professor's letter offers some research-based evidence, I do have a couple of thoughts on this issue that I would like to share.

1. If you are worried about your soil's health, the professor's letter provides some evidence for a calmer approach.
2. If you have a gut feeling that your soil isn't trustworthy, then you have two good, clear choices. Either (a) grow your produce in large pots of potting mix, or (b) grow your produce in raised garden beds. A raised bed 30cm high is adequate for most vegies.
3. I did have a conversation with a soil scientist a while back about this issue, and he did mention that leafy vegies such as silver beet, spinach, Asian greens and lettuce do "suck up" minerals and nutrients from the soil at a much faster rate that fruiting veg (tomatoes, chillies, capsicums) or root veg (potatoes, carrots, beetroot).

So, if my soil scientist is right, perhaps you could grow your fruiting vegies and root vegies in your soil, and your leafy greens in pots or raised beds?

FInally, I'm very conscious of the fact that most of the "contaminants" in my organic urban garden come here via the air, from car and truck exhausts, planes zooming overhead, and polluted city air in general. The main thing to do in this case is thoroughly wash everything you grow at home before eating it.

I hope some of this helps, but I do think that the scare stories the Herald and other newspapers regularly run on all sorts of health issues cause more anxiety – a major modern health problem – and are in themselves a health hazard.