Hi, I’m David Epstein and welcome to my garden and Growing Wisdom. I want to talk about monarda bee balm. Bee balm is interesting and some parts of my garden, I have it just sort of spouting up, it’s very English kind of garden because it’s a mixture of a lot of different perennials. But in one section, I tried this several years ago, look what I did. Look over here. I put all the monarda, all the bee balm together. I’ve put a couple of different varieties but basically it’s one red variety in here and what’s really wonderful about this is that it gives you such a splash of color. You can see it’s just brilliant. It’s going to bloom for many weeks, 3 to 4, 5 weeks if I am lucky. If you cut them back after they’re done blooming, they will rebloom again, not quite as dramatic but they will rebloom right from that little spot. It likes sun to part sun.
I find it does pretty well in just normal soil. It really doesn’t need a very, very rich soil. And it handles a little bit of drought sometimes my bee balm gets fairly dry and it does pretty well. So that’s one of the great things about it, a very easy plant to grow. And hummingbirds and butterflies love these guys. So monarda bee balm put a whole stand of it in. Don’t just put one little plant there. Look how beautiful that looks.
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