Phacelia for Pollinators and Forage: Spring Planting Guide

0:00 [Music]

0:05 All right. So this is our facelia strip. This particular test plot was planted April 15th. We're now middle of June. So we're looking right at 2 months of growth here. And honestly, it's pretty beautiful. The ability of this plant to flower and just

0:23 Produce these wonderful long kind of spiraling down flowers. It's a very fragrant flower. I love this plant.

0:31 This plot looks great. Obviously the main focus of facelia and the reason people utilize it is for the pollinator benefit. The facelia is one of the top plants in terms of nectar producing.

0:43 Especially on the cool season side of things. So if you're a bee producer, if you're trying to attract beneficial insects, facelia should be something you're considering. Now it's a kind of expensive plant. You know, it tends to be north of $4 a pound. So, not normally planted at full rates necessarily.

0:58 Although in small acres that's fine, but in a mix, half a pound, one pound is fine and it's going to show up really nicely and really express itself.

1:09 So flowers, different flowers attract different types of insects and different flower colors attract.

1:17 Different groups of insects as well. We had Jonathan Lungren, probably one of the top entomologists in the country. He was here one year and he was explaining to us how insects can see colors differently. They don't see colors like you and I do, but they see them differently. And he says

1:34 What's often missing is the purple and the blue because you tend to see a lot of yellow and a lot of white, but you don't see a lot of purple and blue in a lot of our native countryside. And so these types of colors are really important for the insects that can see these wavelengths.

1:51 That's why Facelia is such a great addition to these cool season pollinators, cool season bee pasture mixes. There's a bunch of bees out here. You know, just really good growth. Facelia is not an extremely deep rooted crop, but it's got a really fine fibrous root.

2:29 From some of my customers, particularly like up in Idaho where they have a little longer, cooler growing season, cattle will actually eat this and consume this pretty well. So again, like Nathan said, it's kind of expensive to be putting in a grazing mix, but after this has kind of run its course, you

2:45 Could probably turn out and get some grazing off of this if that was a secondary goal you wanted to accomplish.

2:51 Yeah, it's a great thing to add diversity to those spring planting situations cuz we do have some frost tolerance here. So you can put it in March and April and it'll shake off a.

3:01 Few frosts. It'll grow nicely with a in a more diverse setting, you know, not always monoculture planted, but yeah, it it works great in any of those spring soil build or forge mixes.

3:10 And one thing that we have not seen this do as well as what we wished, we can't plant this like in the fall, late.

3:17 Summer, like August. When we plant phacelia in August, it'll grow, but we don't typically see it really flower then. I think further south, you can probably get a secondary bloom in the fall. But for northern regions, probably I7 and north, you're going to be needing to plant this in March and April to get these beautiful blossoms in May, June, and this is going to push even into July for some of this. So again, if you're a bee guy, if you're a pollinator guy, this is a have to have in your mixes.