Nicholas DiBiase
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Poster: Nicholas DiBiase @ Tue Feb 16, 2010 1:16 pm
As a relative newcomer to urban agronomy but a very experienced practitioner of cynicism, crypto-radicalism, and anti-everythingism, I knew already that the current corporate approach to commercial seed-and-plant selling was doomed and damned. It's a fact that many commercial seeds and plants are bred for appearance and not function, and that many of them are genetically designed to be infertile.
However, there is another practice in which I am highly experienced : that of doing things at the last minute. So, when I realized that planting season was upon me and that there was very little bee activity in my food-production area, I zoomed out and hastily bought a lot of started flowers in an attempt to bring th' bees over to where I wanted them. I spent about $75 (that's my strychnine money for a whole week) on snapdragons from Home Depot and marigolds and petunias from Whitfill's Nursery. I planted the suckers in my two containers and in sunken beds that I'd freshly dug, interspersed appropriately with my early food crops' seeds and transplants. I figured that since they'd been locally grown (all were marked with Arizona grow sites) that they'd be 'native' enough to be appropriate for my application. [dun dun duuum!]
Now, there is a big mass of weedy flowering plants on the other side of my yard that is always full of bees, so I figured that a few smart bees were likely to venture over to the new beds and find their tasty flower snax. [Why didn't I just plant my food crops closer to the existing flowers, you ask? It's because there's not enough shade / light filtration in that area for the crops I'm growing.]
I planted the things, and kept them well-watered with a buried soaker hose, and was ready for a bee essplosion!
So imagine my surprise when I watched bee after sleepy bee buzz around and sniff these new flowers, only to turn up their noses at them and pass by without landing! I was like WHAAAT
Meanwhile, the weedy flowering plants on the other side were budding more flowers and attracting more bees than ever. What the snake was wrong?
Here's what's wrong. Instead of planning ahead and planting native wildflowers earlier, I decided to cut corners and buy commerical garbage varieties of subspecies from other states that have nothing to do with my climate and also are unfamiliar to the local insect population (and being sold as ornamentals, may even be engineered to repel insects). See, bees and other benefical critters know to look for plants that grow normally in their area. And when they see and smell a native plant, they know it's good eatin'. But when they see a non-native blooms, they're like "well what is that" and sometimes they don't even recognize it as a potential nectar source. Even if they do recognize it as a flower, its alien smell will not likely entice the little beastie to munch. It's like if you put a big dish of palak paneer in front of a Wyoming cowboy. They'll just be like "now whut in tarnation is that racket" and move on.
So, I then spent all night doing what I should have done way earlier : I dug up some new sunken beds and sowed them with all-native desert wildflower seeds from http://NativeSeeds.org .
There are two lessons here. 1) Don't be lazy and then try to do everything in a quick-fix panic state. 2) Buy only native plant and flower varieties because your local beneficial insect population will know what to do with them.
Get your urban ag cranking in 2010 -- it's not too late.
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