The fall flowers are starting to bloom, so I wandered outside to see which plants are attracting the honeybees.  Our worker bees seemed to be flying right past ironweed and wingstem and making a bee line directly toward the Virgin's Bower.

These pretty white flowers are relatives of the cultivated Clematis you might grow in your flower bed, but around here Virgin's Bower grows wild in open, weedy areas.  The vine is currently twined around several spots which I plan to "clean up" this winter --- knocking down the wild plants to make way for some extra berries.  Given Virgin's Bower's attractiveness to the bees, though, I wonder if I should move some into the forest garden to act as a nectary.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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