Winter forage for me and the bees
Winter limits blooming plants, but you can layer and manage them to produce food for pollinators and your family.
Having the luxury of experiencing all four seasons here in North Carolina creates the opportunity for seasonal flavors. For honey bees and pollinators, winter isn’t top on the list of seasons with high nectar and pollen sources (summer is a challenging time too). One of my more popular posts is about summer forage for me and the bees. Outside of summer, let’s showcase what we can harvest from in the winter too. I want to acknowledge we are still in fall (winter doesn’t officially start until the solstice in December), so I don’t mean to rush the seasons. For some of these plants, now is a good time to grow from seed or transplant so that you can enjoy winter harvests.
Calendula (Calendula officinalis). Calendula’s resinous properties are highly regarded in skincare, and it makes a medicinal tea as well. Cold hardy, calendula can survive frosts and bloom year-round (although less frequently in the winter) and I find it produces much better in winter with cover. Whether you add row covers, invert a clear storage tote as a mini greenhouse, use cloches, or grow in a high tunnel, providing some support to calendula through the winter can increase its bloom period so that it’s available for honey bees and pollinators as well as your own tea or skincare needs.
Sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima). I highlight sweet alyssum’s many garden benefits when I talk to beekeeping clubs about multi-purpose plants for pollinators. In the brassica family, alyssum thrives in colder temperatures like its brassica relatives broccoli and cauliflower. In the warmer months, it attracts hoverfly larvae, which love to eat aphids. Sweet alyssum is a great companion plant because of this trait as it supports organic pest control. Sweet alyssum’s little flowers (often white, but other colorful varieties exist) attract honey bees and other pollinators, they emit the most delicate and calming honey-like aroma, and they’re edible.
Herby ground covers. One of my favorite plant combinations, is an oregano (Origanum vulgare) ground cover under Carolina climbing aster (Ampelaster carolinianus). Carolina climbing aster blooms from the fall through January—popping purple flowers for winter pollinator forage. Although it’s not edible for humans, pairing it with an edible living mulch with herbs creates a great year-round source of food. I have oregano and Carolina climbing aster growing at our mailbox intentionally, and I have the aster growing up lattice on our house with volunteer lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) beneath it—although lemon balm does die back during hard freezes, it can be a tea source through part of the winter. I also think creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum) would be a nice combination, which I might try establishing in another part of the property next year.
Winter teas and bee tea. See my earlier post about bee tea. The same herbs available in winter used to make tea for honey bees can be used for human consumption too: rosemary, lavender, thyme, oregano, calendula, dandelion root, yarrow, sage, and lemon balm. Some of these herbs could be used singularly to create an herbal syrup with honey (oxymel) and doubly used as a cocktail mixer. See an earlier post about making a shrub drink.
Selecting plants that bloom in early or late winter. For folks in temperate areas like North Carolina, I highly recommend referencing Debbie Roos’ Top 25 Native Pollinator Plants for North Carolina on her Pollinator Paradise Garden site, among many other valuable resources. I’m fortunate to live less than 4 miles from the pollinator garden, and I often wonder if the honey bees I see gorging on the plants there are some of my own. Debbie’s plant list breaks down the varieties by season. Although she doesn’t include winter, you can strategically site fall and spring plants to help maximize the shoulder ends of winter forage.
Please share this post and let me know of more winter-blooming plants that can feed wildlife and our families.