My Flowers Bring All the Bees to My Yard

 

Y'all, this might be my least incompetent gardening year yet!

I mean, not because I'm increasing in skill or anything, but more because every year I'm figuring out even more plants that can thrive in my garden in spite of me.

May brings flowers to my homestead lilac, which does not like me to do anything but clear the honeysuckle vines off it every spring:

This lilac is one of the oldest growing things on our property that was intentionally planted (see also: persimmon trees), and every now and then it inspires me to take a break from doing anything productive to instead deep dive into figuring out how to figure out the history of this property. I'm currently working my way through scans of a tiny, gossipy little local newspaper circa 1908 to see if I can find mention of the place or its owners, and annoying everyone around me by reading baffling tidbits:

If you can find a gossipy little newspaper over a hundred years old from your area, I highly recommend it. It is surprisingly engrossing to read about some guy's watermelon harvest, or the ladies' picnic, or the big snake somebody found, or the buggy accident in which all lives were lost.

The deck plants are staying classy, as always, with the addition of the toilet that used to be in the kids' bathroom:

But the real champions of the garden are the perennials that I ignore.

Look at my milkweed!

This is Asclepias syriaca, or common milkweed, the last remnant of Will's old butterfly garden. It's so aggressive that it pops up even in my raised flower beds, and I just plant around it because I'm a pushover for anything nice that wants to live here. The milkweed blooms in June, and the bees LOVE it:

June also brings flowers to the comfrey, and they are also beloved by the bees:

In July, the oregano flowers--

--and so does the lavender:

Late August will bring flowers to our perennial sunflower, and by September I'll have monarch babies to tend to. My plan is to try to bring this year's babies in as eggs--last year, I brought them in as teeny cats, and didn't know until they all died in their pupal stage that every single one had been parasitized by tachinid flies. It was a monumental tragedy, and one that I'd prefer to never repeat again.

Every summer I think about how, during our first summer in this house, the kids and I did a unit study on bees. As part of that, we wanted to find bees and try to identify them, and... couldn't. There were no bees that we could find on our property, no bees for the entire summer. Our property then was all mown lawn, invasive multiflora rose, evergreen shrubs, and invasive rose of Sharon--nothing that a bee would exactly want to visit. Will's the one who brought the bees the next year with her butterfly garden, and since then, even if I can't get a veggie to grow, at least I always have plenty of flowers for the bees.

Maybe next year I should drop the veggies altogether and just go full-on Monarch Waystation.