I Like My Women Like I Like My Coffee... Covered In Bees!

Now that summer is nearly here we've decided to go gardening crazy!  If only we had a garden *sigh*.  We do have our balcony though, on which many a plant has succumbed to lack of watering / aphids that just won't die.  We were out enjoying the sun a couple of weeks ago (remember that sun... where did it go?) when a lovely fat bumble bee came to visit us.  It was love at first sight for Kevin, who now wants as many as possible to come and enjoy our balcony with us.

To say I'm not very good with plants would be a huge understatement.  Everything that's been out on our balcony has died, and at the moment we have four houseplants, two of which are succulents, and they're only all alive because they're indoors so we notice when they need watering.  So whenever I get all excited and suggest to Kevin that we should get loads of pretty flowers for our balcony he just flat out refuses, which is probably a good thing.  However, now he's all excited about bees, he's the one doing the suggesting, and I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth, so on Saturday we spent a couple of hours at our local garden centre looking for some bee friendly plants.

We'd done some highly scientific research beforehand into what would attract bees (i.e. looked on the internet a bit and asked my mum, thanks Mum!) and apparently they like blue flowers, because they can mainly see colours at the blue end of the spectrum.

Anyway, after about an hour-and-a-half wandering around the plant section we came home with these beauties:

• 10 trailing light blue Lobelias
• 6 F1 blue Petunias
• 1 blue Scabiosa
• 1 white and pink Campanula
• 1 purple Sweet Pea
• 1 pink Sweet Pea
• 1 Pieris (forest flame)

The garden centre had very helpfully put some 'Bee Friendly' stickers on some of the plants, and the others we bought because we saw bees landing on them while we were there.

I am madly in love with the Forest Flame (the tall one at the back with the pink leaves).  It's my new favourite thing in the whole flat, so I'm gonna be uber-careful not to kill it!

I planted half of the plants today in two lots of tiered planters.  Space is at a premium on our balcony, so when I saw the idea of making your own tiered planters on this website I pinned it on my things to make and do board, and it's the first thing on there that I've actually done (woo, go me! haha).

I still have the sweet peas and the pieris to plant up tomorrow, along with a gorgeous lavender plant that my mum got us (thanks again Mum!), but without further ado, our new tiered planters:

Bee's-Eye View

The lobelias are in the bottom tier, petunias in the middle and then the scabiosa and campanula in each top pot.  The lobelias are trailing, so hopefully they'll spread out and down over the pot, I'm really excited to see what they look like when the plants are blooming.

I shall post pics of the rest of the plants tomorrow when they're all nicely potted up and I've swept the balcony a bit (compost gets everywhere), and hopefully, possibly, maybe, by the end of this week there may be a white wardrobe in the spare room.  Maybe.