BBF stands for Banded Bee Farm. The blue banded bee is an Australian native solitary bee and buzz pollinator, like a bumblebee, only smaller.
We grow and enjoy red cabbage but are thoroughly fed up with poor germination so we decided to try landracing it. Perhaps a little hybrid vigour will do it some good. To that end we planted a mix of five cultivars totalling forty plants. A little caterpillar destroyed a good number by eating out the main stem. A few were untouched and a few of the eaten ones have reshot. I think we’ve ended up with about 15 plants. With them we sowed a green manure mix of coriander, lettuce, flax, corn, amaranth and beetroot. Most of the corn and all amaranth has been cut twice and laid down as mulch or fed to the chooks. They will die off when frost arrives which should be any time now. It’s a bit later than usual this year.
Here’s a pic:
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What a great idea!
I didn’t understand the link between red cabbage and blue banded bees.
The blue band bees are an auxiliary to destroy the caterpillars you encounter? or they are there to forage your coriander and flowers?
It’s always amazing to me to hear that you’ve already come to winter… here is the novelty 2024, summer cycles for 4 days followed by 10 days of winters, crops are complex to set up with a lot of failure in direct sowing
Sorry. I wasn’t very clear. There is no link. Our farm’s name is Banded Bee Farm, named after this particular native bee. We use the initials, BBF, to distinguish seeds saved on the farm from those acquired elsewhere.
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