Flowers in the Garden

I really enjoy taking pictures of the wild plants and flowers in my garden. I think in part because they are so useful. They attract bees and other pollinators, they require no water or effort on my part, and they look lovely, too. With the colors and shapes, I really need to get it in gear one day and just print a few, for something pretty and inexpensive to put on the walls!

Here's a few that have bloomed in the last couple of months.

Hairyseed Bahia

Mysteries solved #2 - the Not-Mesquite

My mystery 'not-mesquite': Desert Bird of Paradise

I have a lot of mesquite seedlings pop up and sometimes I just leave them alone and grow a new tree. Only one of them this time around is not a mesquite. It had leaves that seemed like a mesquite

See, mesquite-ish

The waffle garden - watering, bees, and ants

Continued from this post
Waffle Garden update!

Well, my seedlings are still alive and growing slowly but surely. Take a look!

         

My little baby waffle garden

You'll notice that the sunflowers and squash have come up well, while there are just a couple beans poking up, too. This sunflowers get me all excited because they are a combination of my own saved seeds from two years ago plus purchased seeds from Native Seed Search, and both sprouted! That middle square at the top has a bare patch but that's not due to critters eating seedlings; nothing ever came up! I don't know if the seeds were eaten by birds, if they were buried too deep, or if something else happened, but that spots has remained bare enough that I might plant something else there before too long. 

Attracting Native Bees

One way to attract some native bees to pollinate your garden is to make your garden a bee friendly place.

Bee food!

Out here in the Sonoran desert, the vast majority of native bees are both solitary and burrow in the ground for brood cells for their babies. There are also leaf cutter and mason bees here who use previously made beetle tunnels in old wood. And all of the native bees are, obviously, adapted to eating native foods.

So, what can we do to encourage these lovely insects to stick around and pollinate our yards?