Flowers for Pollinators: Four O'Clocks, Calendula, Baby's Breath & Catnip

0:00 A few other flowers that we're looking at and these four o'clocks are beautiful flowers. Unfortunately we didn't get a very good stand, not exactly sure if we had some low standard seed or we just didn't get good seed to.

0:14 Soil contact the ones that came up look really, really nice beautiful blossoms starting to come out, nice big leaf. So those are four o'clocks.

0:22 These are calendulas right here. I'm a little disappointed in these—these have looked better in the past, they look.

0:28 Good, there's a lot of insect feeding here. Grasshoppers or something are really kind of chewing on these leaves and I think holding them back, so we'll have to kind of check into that. But in the past calendulas have done pretty well.

0:41 And then here to my right baby's breath, very popular in flower arrangements and stuff. It hasn't quite hit its stride yet. I'm not sure it likes as much heat as we've had. It looks a little bit heat stressed here as well, but just looking at all kinds of.

0:56 Diversity and then over here we have catnip which is in the mint family. And again I'm not sure that we'll really put this in a lot of mixes but it was available so we tried it a lot of insect.

1:09 Activity here. But Dale, what would be one of the drawbacks to using very much of this? Might bring in mountain lions.

1:17 So you never know. A number of the mint family.

1:24 The plants in the mint family tend to be very aggressive. I'm a little fearful. We'll evaluate it for a while, worried about its weedy potential. That's something we always look at. Any new cover crop we don't want to be.

1:53 If you're looking at it as a crop that's a bad thing, but if you're looking at it as a cover crop, sometimes that's a good thing because insects you bring in insects you.

2:04 Bring in insect predators, other insects. Yeah, yeah, you know the bugs that bite us have bugs that bite them, and even those have ones that bite them and so on ad infinitum. You know, everything's eaten by something, and if you bring in.

2:19 These insects that you know don't harm any of our crops. It brings in insect eaters, brings in birds, brings in praying mantises, spiders, all sorts of predatory.

2:34 Insect feeders and so you get good general insect control and you just don't end up with outbreaks. So this is not necessarily a bad thing that would be better in a mix than it would be in this strip by itself, right? You put it in a mix, it's just fine.