426. Bluebird Gardens | CHARLOTTE EKKER WIGGINS | Missouri

Tuesday • March 15, 2022

Here from Missouri is an amazing beekeeper, gardener, and author, CHARLOTTE EKKER WIGGINS!

Bee Club Basics: How to Start a Bee ClubA Beekeeper's Diary: Self Guide to Keeping Bees

Has lots of checklists to help you get started.

Master Beekeeper class is using her next book Bees Need Flowers, Planting for Pollinators coming out soon.

Tips include:

• reading a lot. 
• Join a bee club because it's like learning a new language.
• Beekeeping is very local
• Need to know bee biology to work with bees not tell them what to do
• Spend a year learning about beekeeping by taking 1 or more classes, reading, meeting other beekeepers.

Bees are colony based, not self centered like humans. Bees sometimes leave because they don't want to spread disease to the hive.

Jackie asks what if you can't find a club? 

Thanks to the pandemic lots of clubs are meeting on Zoom like Bees Beyond Borders in Florida have guest speakers from leading bee experts in the country.

What works and what doesn't in a garden

The critical part of providing bees is your SOIL HAS TO BE HEALTHY!

Need to keep soil healthy which will keep plants healthy and then bees will be healthy and food we eat will be healthy.

One out of every 3 bites of food we eat is from bee pollination.

• Composting is the easiest thing to do.
• Mulch with compost.
• Lots of bird houses for natural pest control

I'm the same way. There's so many garden chores I don't want to do but compost is so easy! I don't understand people who say it's too hard, messy or complicated.

Charlotte adds we need to move away from perfection. In the old days, magazines used to really focus on green lawns. Common sense says it's expensive to put in, you need to put in high expensive fertilizers, the minute it grows you cut it down and it doesn't really add anything to the environment.

A bug bite on a rose leaf is exciting it means there's a relationship between ladybugs and praying mantis etc who are eating the pests in the garden because they need food so a whole in a leaf is important for the rose to grow.

What grew well? 

Catnip

What's something new or different your excited to try?

Some Baker Creek Co Seeds.https://www.rareseeds.com/

Some flowers and peppers that were ordered.

I like the tried and true. 

Do you save your own seeds?

I just tried spaghetti squash and loved it so I saved those. I also do companion planting. I plant onions around my roses to deter bugs and if I need an onion. I mix my vegetables and flowers, I don't have them in rows, I plant them in with my flowers because I can move them around each year so they're not planted in the same soil and using up all the nutrients and the pollinators are attracted by the flowers. 

How about something that didn't go the way you thought is was going to?

My least favorite thing is to dig holes, I didn't get as much mulch as I would have liked in some new flower beds, and I planted...