GARDENING HINTS
I’m sure that many of you will be searching the bulb catalogues now to put in your orders or going to the garden centre to buy your bulbs for the Spring, so now is the time to raise awareness about whether to buy organic or non-organic bulbs, rather like the choice you have to make at the supermarket. It won’t surprise you to know that, like the organic supermarket food, organic bulbs are more expensive. I’m not totally sure why.
However, I took the plunge this year and ordered all my bulbs from Peter Nyssen. Since 2018 they decided to source ‘all our spring-flowering bulbs free from neonicotinoid pesticides. These chemicals have been found to adversely affect the health of our precious pollinators so we’ve decided to demand that all our spring bulbs are ‘bee-friendly.’
Neonicotinoids are a type of pesticide that has gained popularity within the agricultural world as they are effective against a wide range of insects. In the flower bulb world specifically, neonicotinoids are used to drench bulbs to keep aphids and other sap-sucking insects off plants. They are systemic pesticides i.e. they are absorbed by the whole plant and transported to all its tissues (from root to flower) including the pollen and nectar. I decided that I would not feel comfortable watching bees going out and about in the garden this coming Spring if I thought that they were actually being harmed by what I had planted.
There are a lot of companies now selling organic bulbs if you search them out. This means that no chemicals will have been used in the production, there will be no toxins contaminating the food source of essential pollinators, no fungicides leaking into our water systems, no neonicotinoids impeding the vital work of earthworms in the soil and no exposure to irritants for humans who work in the bulb fields.
That is the end of the soap box!
Make your choice…. Having become very anxious about the lack of any buzzing in the garden this year (very little on the lavender, or the lime blossom- both usually teaming with bees), imagine how unusual it might be to become very excited on finding a wasps’ nest! A large hole in the middle of a flower bed with a great deal of comings and goings, so no weeding just there for a while. Are they wasps? They are black and yellow, but they are moving too quickly to see them clearly. But anyway wasps are important pollinators too, so they can stay