The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 8 of 21
Borage
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
Borage is the other strip. It is slower from seed than phacelia and longer in flower: a field crop in Poland that opened in late June stayed in flower for eight weeks. Each small blue flower refills with nectar within a couple of minutes of a bee leaving it, and a square metre of the crop gives a few grams each of nectar sugar and blue-grey pollen over a season.
The two plants keep different clocks. Borage sown a fortnight before phacelia opens earlier and runs about as late, so two strips of different plants can be laid end to end across a stretch of summer.