April 26, 2020

Veggie Plants, Produce, and Pollinator Favorites

It’s time to get the spring plants in the ground! This week at the Virtual Farmstand, we have a few tomato and pepper plants left, as well as zucchini starts and some bumblebee, hummingbird, and butterfly favorites for your pollinator garden.  We also have some nice produce, including sugar snap peas, kale, chard, and artichokes, as well as duck and chicken eggs. As always, we have several different Sonoma County honeys and our own organic lavender oil, hydrosol, sachets, and lavender hand sanitizer too. You can order online here, and pick up on Tuesday or Friday between 10 AM and 12 PM at the farm (3883 Petaluma Hill Rd, Santa Rosa).

Dark Green Zucchini plants--highly productive!
Bees N Blooms lavender products are made from our own certified organic lavender. Pure lavender oil, lavender hydrosol, and a new lavender hand sanitizer spray.
Sungolds are one of our favorites. Sweet and prolific, perfect with mozzarella for a Caprese salad. Indeterminate, 57 days to maturity.
Aloha Rose Basketflower, an absolute FAVORITE of bumble bees!
Mountain Mint. A real favorite of the honey bee
Maximillian sunflower, a long-blooming perennial, providing both pollen and nectar for pollinators.
Horsemint. Hummingbirds love this plant!
McKana Giants Columbine. Great for cuts!
Ruby Buckwheat, a perennial native buckwheat that many native pollinators adore. Blooms late in the season, providing valuable nectar resources during August and September.
Angel (the white gander), Honey (with the baby), and Ella. They are very protective of the new little one.

In other farm news, our baby geese are growing up fast, and we’re now integrating the incubated chicks May and Max (imprinted on humans) with the adult geese and the one baby they are raising. It’s going OK, although one of the adult geese is always chasing Max and May. I’m sure they will work it out over time, but as the official “goose mom” of Max and May, I do worry!

They are Cotton Patch geese, a breed that was used in the Southeast U.S. to help weed cotton fields before herbicides were used extensively. The males are typically white and the females are either solid gray or gray mixed with some white in a saddleback pattern if they have the “pied” gene. Ours are the solid gray type. They are friendly and chatty and provide great entertainment and assistance with weeding (I keep trying to train them to love bindweed). The breed is rare now, and we are trying to do our part to keep it alive and healthy. We love their antics and their closeness to humans.

We hope to be open at some point when they County gives the go-ahead. We’ll keep you posted!

Farm News
About Susan Kegley

Susan is one of the owners of Bees N Blooms farm. She loves farming and beekeeping because they provide a never-ending source of engagement with nature, opportunities for puzzle-solving, observation, and learning new things, and access to breathtaking beauty and wonder.

7 Comments
  1. Marian Doyle-Landis May 20, 2020 at 10:04 pm Reply

    hello . im looking for milkweed and one with the bigger leaves and stems. do you have that ? thanks

    • Those are the Common Milkweed. We have some growing, but they are not quite ready for sale yet. Another few weeks. Our Monarchs don’t arrive until late summer/fall, so there’s time!

  2. So glad email works well, love to see your enterprise blossom! Might have to order to do my part, your neighbor to the west, heidi keller.

  3. I would love to pick up sugar snap peas if you have available tomorrow morning ?

  4. Thanks for the update, goose mom. It is good to “hear your voice”.
    As the old TV ad used to say, “Open, open, open!”

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