Page 34 - ALG Issue 4 2020

readers articles Fantastic Phacelia!
One of the things I love most about this wonderful plant is that you can HEAR our Phacelia patch long before you reach it. Not tens, not hundreds but thousands of bees humming and buzzing, feasting on their new day’s food supply. If you want to support wildlife – especially our endangered bees – then this is the plant to grow.
Phacelia is often known as Blue Tansy, Purple Tansy or Bees’ Friend. This beautiful looking purple annual with
its fern-like leaves and its numerous, densely clustered lavender-blue flowers, attracts bees the way few other plants can. It is a lovely looking flower, nitrogen holder, soil improver, pollinator magnet, weed suppressor, terrifically high in nectar and a good source of pollen; what is not to like about this marvelous plant? We often have other plotholders and visitors stopping and taking photographs and videos of the plot just to listen to the bees humming and to watch in wonder.
Nicole, my wife, and I have an allotment each side by side. Each year we rotate a large fallow patch around the two plots. Instead of leaving the fallow patch bare, we plant it with Phacelia. Phacelia dominates and covers the land and prevents all those horrible, nasty weeds from thriving. Thistles, nettles, dock and dandelions, even if they do manage to live amongst it, are usually tiny,
weak and easy to remove. As the plant flowers, instead of one single flower that is short-lived and then quickly dies,
Phacelia flowers grow like an ever- growing tower of blooms. Each day brings a new flowering top as the bloom curls up and up, day-by-day, providing
a readymade meal fresh each day for the bees. It’s takeaway time every day for them! Day after day throughout the entire season, Phacelia provides for
the bees. The hoverflies and butterflies don’t mind visiting it too. Its self- seeding, so once you have planted a few seeds you will have enough to last you a lifetime! But unlike many other ‘green manures’ that can become a nuisance, Phacelia is not invasive and is so easy to control; a heavy wind or a clumsy brush against the base of the stem can cause it to detach from the soil.
Successive sowings, every two or three weeks throughout the season, will provide an abundant supply of bee food flowers, from the moment the bees emerge up until late autumn, long after the very last bee has disappeared. You can then harvest the seeds and, believe
Its self- seeding, so once you have planted a few seeds you will have enough to last you a lifetime!
me, you will have as much as you need. A word of warning: it is best to wear gloves when gathering the seed; the tiny hairs can be quite sharp and can cause some people skin irritation.
The roots are like a matrix of fine white fibres that spread throughout the soil, breaking it up, giving the soil a crumbly texture. The stems are tubular and, when dried out and finished at the end of the season, are dug back into the soil; they aerate the soil and break down, providing precious organic matter into the soil, or it can be simply left to lay on the soil over winter and shelter the soil, providing a good mulch that prevents the rain from leaching all the nutrients from the soil, ready to be dug in next spring. Try it. I’m sure you, your friends and fellow allotment keepers will be amazed at this Wonder Plant.
Granville, Nicole and the Bees
34 Allotment and Leisure Gardener