Campaign for Bees

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to spread the word about Friends of the Earth's campaign to help save our bees.. just click here to go and sign a petition to government calling for a ban on the most harmful pesticides to bees, a complete ban on pesticides for bee pollinated crops (with help for farmers) and an urgent call to stop the use of pesticides in parks, to safeguard both our bees and our children's health.

Many thanks for joining in, if you have a minute!

__________

While we're on bees, I just wanted to share two amazing things I found out .. first is that you can help bees by putting some water out in the garden. The second is that they can't see red .. check out this brilliant post on Plantlife which shows how bees see things. I love learning this stuff!

Bee Friendly

Just to share this Soil Association raffle to raise money for bee-friendly farming .. I know you guys are all bee-lovers!!

Rose Oil

I tried last summer for the first time to make a rose oil. I knew it would be very small, as I didn't have many fragrant roses to use.. I had two stupendously large and fragrant and velvety blooms from my Etoile de Holland, which had only been a cutting six months earlier and I had the flowers from my wild rose - it would put one out for me every couple of days, but it was still getting its feet in, having been transplanted to the new garden fairly recently too.

Well, this year I have an abundance of roses, hurrah! You know, though, I couldn't pick the Etoile de Holland blooms, about 10 this year. It flowered early while we were enjoying warm weather (seems like a while ago now, huh?) and I enjoyed seeing it from the house so much and smelling its fragrance filling the warm still air out in the garden that I couldn't do it. Mum-in-law tells me that I may be able to get it to do a second flowering later in the year .. I shall feed it and talk to it and see.

However, my old friend the wild rose is now a veritable bush .. this summer it is just flowering and flowering and there are always more buds coming, it seems. And the flowers are sweetly fragrant. The only problem with picking them is that they always have a bee or hoverfly inside... and I should point out here that I always leave plenty of flowers for the bees when I gather them to use.

So how do you make rose oil.. well you just stick the (dry) petals in a little jar, cover them with oil and sit the jar in the sun. I use sunflower oil, as it doesn't have much smell and the rose fragrance can be easily overpowered by stronger smelling oils. Put your jar on some kitchen roll because it will ooze however careful you are. The idea is that you leave the petals in the oil to infuse in the sun. When all the colour has gone from the petals you can carefully strain the oil, ringing all the oil from the spent petals using a muslin or coffee filter paper, then return to the jar with new petals. I just keep adding petals to the jar each day till its full then wait. The main problem is getting enough sunshine! I have a very sunny southfacing windowsill (which happily grows tomatoes and sunflowers) so I am hoping for the best, but the weather will have to start playing ball at some point if it is to work! It will take months and months, but I think it will be worth it.

Last year I only achieved a very slightly scented oil, due to a lack of sufficient roses over the whole season. I made it into little pots of rose lipbalm, and the rose fragrance was so ephemeral as to barely be there .. sometimes I thought I was just remembering it or smelling it with the 'nose of faith'! But it so much better than using essential oil, which is desperately expensive in any case. Will let you know how this year's turns out.

I have read about making rose oil in a number of different places, all outlining the same basic method, but it is included in 'Herbal Remedies: A practical beginner's guide fo making effective remedies in the kitchen' by Christopher Hedley and Non Shaw, which I can't recommend highly enough if you want a good guide to making infused oils and salves at home. Its what I used when I started on my herbal adventures and has good clear instructions with plenty of photos.

Or, if you love all things historical, like me, you might like to read the Anglo-Saxon version, (translated) from the Lacnunga manuscript dating to around 1000AD:

'For rose oil, make it thus: one pound of oil, one ounce of mature rose flower; mix together in a glass jar under gypsum and hang in the sun for 40 days so its power may be styptic and cooling; use it for many illnesses, mostly for pain in the head ... that is emigraneum'

This is taken from 'Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plantlore and Healing' by Stephen Pollington, which I was thumbing through researching for something else entirely when this rose oil entry jumped out and took me by surprise. Imagine my delight (especially as a migraine sufferer!)

Valerian

In the herb garden at the moment, the highlight (with the emphasis on 'high'!)is definitely the valerian which is in beautiful full bloom. The whole plant just took off this year and now towers high above the fence and after last weeks stormy weather I've had to tie it in a bit, but I find it rather glorious. The blossoms are white tinged beautifully with pink and give off a heady scent. The tiny little flowerlets shower all over the plants and paving below like stardust, a white sprinkling making everything around it slightly magical. The air is full of the sound of bees, which can't get enough of it. It wasn't so much an attempt to photograph a bee on a valerian head, as that you can't take a photo of a valerian head without a bee getting into the shot!

Now valerian was really a bit of a mistake for me. Back when I was starting out I read about it and its properties and got excited and wanted to have some to grow .. before I read further and realised that you would only want to use the root, and even that only dug at the right time of year in the right year of its growth. As I have always had such a small garden (only a collection of window boxes when I was beginning) it was important that each plant earn its place - beautiful, useful and preferably multi-purpose. So it doesn't really qualify.

But the thing about valerian is, it doesn't give up. I think it might be one of those plants that once you've got it, you've got it forever! One of the limitations and joys of my rooftop garden in Tottenham was that it just got left from October to March each year. During this time, I handed the baton over to mother nature who would handle the gardening for me till the next spring. She taught me all the most important lessons I have learned about plants and gardening and she always left me lots of little baby plantlets for the following year. Most of these would be valerian - it seeds itself all over the place. All these little valerians taught me something, because the colour of the leaves would be completely different in different parts of the garden - so it was showing me how conditions varied, the conditions it liked and how they affected its growth.

Think its probably safe to say its got the right conditions in the new herb garden! I saw earlier in the year that it was bullying other plants out of the bed, but I've let it flower. It has such thick tall strong stems that it supports other herbs around it - in particular a beautiful bronze fennel that grows up through it. And later in the year, once its heyday is done, its tall skeleton will be handy for tying in the evening primrose next to it which doesn't take off until much later.

Bees

The herb garden is at its finest, with a whole host of flowers opening and doing their thing. We had glorious sunshine yesterday afternoon, and the bees were busy working away on all the blossoms.. I've never seen so many. And I'm glad I put a pot of chives on the kitchen windowsill, because I get to see the many bee visits at close quarters while I'm cooking or washing up!











Also, this year, the valerian and sunflowers are about eye-level height.. so I can get a really good look at the bees (who don't seem to mind as they are so busy in the flowers!). I've seen big fat bumbles, but also longer narrow bees and I've decided to try and find out a bit more about the different types of bee that might visit an English garden.