Allotments 4 All

The flower thing sounds logical -but I planted Fr. Marigolds at the door end of my greenhouse and peppers at the other end -the peppers did ok without intervention from me.

Even the early strawbs probably wood -by the time I get around to pollinating them the spiders and whitefly seem to have done the job :)

Jeremy.

Spiders pollinate?? I was wondering about my next but one lottie neighbour - all of his strawbs are under netting, I couldn't figure out how they got pollinated!

Ten x

It's a guess really -but there's only them & the whitefly in there at the time- and the spiders chase the flies as exidenced by the whitely caught in webs on the strawbs. Who needs yellow sticky traps?

Bring me spiders! My greenhouse is ALREADY full of the little white critters, was wondering how on earth to get rid of them ??? DP

Ten- carrying your analogy a little further: would you walk to the bar if they are giving away champagne at the door? Insects will always be attracted to flowers with the highest sugar content in their nectar. While marigolds may not be more attractive to bees (or others) than peppers others may prove more attractive. I mentioned a while ago that oil seed rape has nectar higher in sugars than apples; this is an illustration of the incongruity of reality compared to our expectations. You should remember too that once an individual bee starts harvesting nectar from one specie of plant it will never go to another specie in it's lifetime.

How interesting, I didn't know that about bees - I assumed that they treated the garden rather like the Pick 'n Mix counter at Woolworths!

Paintbrush plan it is then - I've got one flower that's hanging down in an "I'm opening soon, get ready to pollinate me" way.

Ten x