The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 14 of 21
Heather, the gap's own honey
All chapters
- A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
- Reading a bloom window
- Where the year sags
- The gap is worth more than the peak
- Nectar plants and pollen plants
- Willow, the first pollen
- Phacelia, six weeks from seed
- Borage
- Sowing for a date
- A strip sown too late
- White clover in the grass
- A meadow takes two years
- Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
- Heather, the gap's own honey
- Fruit trees and the years before blossom
- A lime tree for the next keeper
- Black locust
- Ivy on the fence
- Nothing to water, nothing dies
- What a planting can name on the jar
- Siting the hive matters more
Ling heather flowers from late July into September and is at its best in late August, at the tail of the summer dearth. It wants acid soil, and plants set close knit into a carpet in two to three years.
Heather honey is dark, strong and sets as a jelly, and it sells at a significant premium. It comes from the moors, where keepers carry their hives in August. A few garden patches do not make it, any more than a bed makes lavender honey.
In this game three grown patches make heather honey; two never reach the 60 percent a super needs. Add a super on Aug 21 to a strong hive that has wintered: until Sep 3 the heather goes into it first.
Take it off after the heather finishes on Sep 15. A jelly honey, it is pressed, not spun.