Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and i'm about to say about the least controversial
thing you can say in gardening: bees are important and this isn't just for you veggie guys and fruit
guys where the pollination will determine your yield but also for the reproductive
health of everything in the garden that cross pollination allows for diverse offspring
and the health of the populations of the plants but what is the right thing the best thing
to plant to support the health of your bees in your neighborhood? That of course may vary a
little bit by your climate and region but if you ask me off the top of my head to name a few that
i love for bees i'm going to do that for you right now first of all: Kniphofia, red hot poker i'll put
a picture up of this tons of nectar and that's what's true of all of the plants on this list
pollen or nectar to support the bees next one on the list i would say is Butterfly weed (asclepias)
even though it's named for butterflies is excellent for bees third one on the list penstemon love the
penstemons. "Beard tongue" is its common name and again bees go crazy for it in the garden you'll
never find it without bees in the garden cosmos it's a classic daisy but again favored by bees and
finally i'm going to say borage and borage is the plant where i plant it has blue flowers and it is
the most likely to always have bees on it in the garden and when i say all of this and i'm picking
some of my favorites it's actually defeating the purpose a little bit because i have to say it
isn't about finding the one perfect plant for bees but rather by choosing a bunch of different plants
that the bees can visit throughout the year so you fill in all those gaps of flowering in your garden
for instance in the borage family and i'm going to say that go back to that picture of the borage in
the borage family there are some early flowering relatives that i can show you are blooming in
my garden right now things like Pulmonaria is out there and brunnera is out there as well i'll
show the pictures of those so it will fill up those gaps in your garden now here i'm saying
all of these things that are good for bees but i just watched a video recently by another local
nurseryman who said that everything i know about bees is wrong and i thought
well that's an intriguing title and he was good enough to agree to talk to
me about the topic and show me his nursery so what follows now is a
tour of PlanBee native plant nursery i'm with Josh on this and he has a completely different
point of view about what are the best things to plant for bees in your garden hey guys i'm Josh
i'm the owner of PlanBee Native Plants here in langley and i grow exclusively native plants to
bc so i'm going to show you around my area here this is this side of my greenhouse is kind of my
sales area where people come in and look at plants and pick the ones out they want to buy
this one here is a cool one a very really popular one called henderson's checker
mallow it's actually blue listed which means it's kind of a species at risk in bc here
you know all these plants grow in different areas around bc here's one you guys might like
this is called a bald hip rose which is a native rose species that likes a lot of shady areas
that's one of our natives we also have the Nootka rose and we also have
the prickly rose or rosa acularis right and Rosa woodsii
actually that's one that's not on my radar okay cool there we go
we have lots of different plants here we got notting onions and hookers onion we have a lot
of plants with the prefix hooker and that was actually because it was a 18th century botanist
that named a lot of our plants right we have a a few "douglasii" as well
here's oval-leaf blueberry which is actually a member of the huckleberry family that's one of the names
for it those are tasty oh yes very tasty now you do you also have the red huckleberry i do at times
but the all the vacciniums or the huckleberries are really popular so they sell it pretty quickly
when i have them all right i'm just going to back up on your signage here because i want to see that
so this is the PlanBee native plants now why native plants why is the focus of your nursery on that
particularly so native plants i discovered are really important for our insects and our
wildlife literally everything in our ecosystem relies on these specific plants to survive like
pretty much every butterfly species you have is going to have a specific plant or group of plants
that it relies on to lay its eggs on because those are the only food the caterpillars can eat
a lot of our bees are specialists or even you can use bumble bees as well
so they have like finite resources finite plants they can access nectars from so if honeybees
are in the area and they can also access their plant those plants plus all the other ones and
they're really creating a lot of competition that can drive out the native bee species that
are really at risk and the ones we really need to be protecting so as um you know our urban
ecosystems expand and get rid of wild habitat these plants are also going and that's why
we're seeing so much decline of insects and wildlife and bees and everything so
adding these plants into our ecosystem is going to just benefit wildlife and help support more and
more that must make it difficult in certain ways because i know the nursery business a little bit
in sourcing your plants where you uh where do you get these i mean you can't you can't just
go to most of your wholesalers and buy finished native plants um i do actually have one wholesaler
i order some of my plants from but a large amount of them i am growing myself and i'm hoping as i go
forward to growing more and more of them myself and be completely self-sufficient eventually but
many of these plants actually take years to grow from seed into a plant a phase or a spot where
they are sellable right yeah so if you want to get something here with flowers on it you know
um and large enough to fill the pot uh that might be a couple of seasons in the pot right so it's
not exactly i mean there's certain ones you can grow in a few months like three months is a
average for a lot of them but certain ones you're looking at at least like a full season full year
right so the next year and do you do any of these from cuttings um i've been experimenting with
cuttings a little bit none of these are from cuttings that i have available currently but
i have some in the back i can actually show you here we got snowberry we got some red elderberry
over here yeah elderberries are nice and easy to take from cuttings oh yeah really easy get
some twin berry and you know i'm not a big fan of cuttings just because you're cutting down on the
genetic diversity um and then you have all these plants out there they have the same genetics so if
they ever get sick then all them are going to die and it kind of it kind of um washes down the local
genetics of like that are really adapted to your climate if you're putting out the same ones
everywhere right so i'm trying to do everything from seed but i thought this year i was gonna
supplement some of my stock a little bit with these cool and what do you see are these lupins
over here yeah these ones are actually a river lupine which is a red listed species they're
actually uh endangered i think there's only seven wild populations left really yeah and what uh what
color are they the blue yeah they're blue okay and i also have a big leaf lupine which is the much
more common one here a lot of those growing and those are those are related i think they're one
of the parent species of one of the commercial lupines the uh oh the russell domesticated
russell hybrid yes they are interesting thing about russell hybrid though is
when they actually seed and reproduce they turn back into the non-cultivar version the big leaf
yeah so if you just if you just let them reseed in the garden they more or less revert to the native
species yeah exactly that's kind of cool also although i think a lot of homeowners probably
don't appreciate the massive lupines afterwards okay so if i get if i put lupins in my garden i
have to say first thing that happens or on a predictable schedule they will be taken over
by aphids oh really that's true they seem to be a particular magnet for aphids but i don't
go nuts on the trying to eradicate the aphids i kind of feel like um if the lupines attract
the aphids early then they're going to uh they're going to also attract all those people things that
feed on the aphids the beneficials and the the predators and maybe maybe my roses will be spared
how do you deal with pests here yeah i mean i don't really have a big issue with pests because
i have exactly that i have all these different native plants that attract all these predator
insects as well as like you know i might get aphids occasionally but they don't generally
last very long because i have all the other plants attracting the predators of the insects and the
wasps that will eat the aphids and things like that right so you're set up here you're set up in
a greenhouse and i noted that you uh you share this space it's actually a larger greenhouse
facility and you share it with with other growers and you're just leasing a portion of it that is
a really clever way to get into the nursery business instead of instead of having to buy
or build your own facility just leasing a space off of another grower and just taking up some some
floor space from them yeah it's definitely worked out pretty nicely for me i kind of got my start
um you know i just moved into this greenhouse in the fall i kind of got my start at another smaller
location of a family friend that let me kind of set up on their property so this was a really
nice little jump from that to this it's a much bigger area and it works out really nicely for
the rent and everything that's what i'm talking about when i'm saying some of these are going to
take years to grow especially anything in the lilly family this is actually a great camas
oh this is one year old now and this probably won't do much more until it's about four years
it might flower four years is when you'll get your first flower from growing in a tray of water is
that on purpose or is that that is on purpose they like very uh wet spring conditions and dry summers
that's just part of their ecosystem of the gary oak ecosystem and how it works generally right so
the wet they're not rotting no they're not rotting that's actually what they prefer chemist is one
of our natives that does have cultivated cultivars like has has available you can go to the bare root
distributors and buy canvas it would be different than this but again your one of your reasons
is maintaining uh ecological diversity you don't want to just go okay i'm going to get commercially
cultivated one variety of canvas it's it's to have the whole diversity going on yeah
you because you really want the native genetics because when you have a cultivar you're changing
the genetics and you know sometimes it's not that bad but sometimes it can change things like
you know just something as simple as the taste of the plant might be unappealing to the insects
that would naturally depend on it or or a lot of times you know you'll find cultivars that are
are sterile and don't produce nectar or pollen or they can't reproduce things like that
right or you know even like things like the change of color can also be
um can affect how insects will see them and how they'll feed on them yeah if you change the color
a b might not even recognize that as something appealing to it and what is this this is a
these are miners lettuce yeah that's miner's lettuce there that's kind of cool and edible yeah
indebtable these ones are also miners list but these ones are siberian miners lettuce you have uh
it looks like seeding trays yes trays of a lot of stuff i started a lot of my stuff in these trays
um you know this year i've started a lot of things just directly in one gown pots as well like some
of the shrubs and trees that are going to grow to that size because it cuts down on the time overall
for sure and i see you're probably just starting these at natural temperatures right i mean well
you're in a greenhouse but you're not you're not doing heated benches you're not doing any kind
of germination chamber or anything like that this is just you know straight up letting
nature do its thing yeah exactly um you know i can't beat nature these plants don't have like
all these specific things going for them outside when they're germinating and doing their thing
in nature so i just try to keep it as natural as i can i actually plant pretty much all of
my seeds in the fall and i just leave them with the greenhouse door open so they can get that
cold air and breeze in over the winter what would be your um your pitch to an average gardener
who you know wants to be able to use let's say all the colors of the palette they want to be
able to use native plants they want to be able to use exotic plants is it just a matter of you know
spare some space in your garden for some of the natives yeah i mean there's nothing
wrong with using some of the cultivars and other species too but it's just all about bounce right
um you know try to add some of the native plants into your garden as well and you know
you're probably gonna find that's gonna help you keep a problem insects like aphids down as well
all right that's the end of the tour and thank you so much for watching i hope you
found that informative it truly is one of my great pleasures in life to find people
who have different points of view than me and that i can learn something from by listening
to them so it was a pleasure for me to visit that i may not come away vowing to only grow
native plants but i don't think that's what he's asking anyway he just wants to make some room in
my garden and i can do that alright thanks for watching and if you have any other questions
or comments about the best plants for bees please drop those into the comments below the video