Lacy Phacelia | Phacelia tanacetifolia | Certified Organic
Also called Bee's Friend. A highly beneficial flower for pollinators and soil building.
If you have been looking for a flower that offers a trifecta of usefulness, look no further than Lacy Phacelia. Also known as Bee's Friend and Lacy Tansy, you can protect and renew your garden bed soils while providing a needed nectar source for pollinators, a beautiful living landscape for your yard, and cut flowers for your home.
Cover crops, while immensely useful in maintaining soil health, don't necessarily conjure up visions of ethereal elegance. But Phacelia, a well known cover crop in Europe (though originally a Southwest native), is finding its way into American gardens for its delicate beauty and irresistible sweet bee nectar. It produces nectar 24 hours a day, and pollinators prefer it over other crops. It provides a great amount of bio-mass and winter kills, making it easy to deal with in the spring. And if that isn't enough, the blooms are quick, elegant, unfurling spirals of lavender loveliness. Plus their long sturdy stems and ferny foliage make them a great cut flower.
Direct sow in well prepared garden bed in early spring. Sow ¼˝ deep. Space every 1-2˝ for an insectary crop, more densely for a cover crop.
Days to Germination 3-10 days
Days to Maturity 60 days
Planting Depth ½"
Spacing in Row 1-6"
Spacing Between Rows 12"
Height at Maturity 32"
Width at Maturity 10"
Artwork by Frances Gaffney. Her large watercolour painting depicts a celestial Phacelia flower head hovering over a Hudson Valley farm covered in blooms. It reaches out in all directions, beckoning bees, healing the land, and eventually fading into the sky.
About Hudson Valley Seed Company
They are a values-driven seed company that practices and celebrates responsible seed production and stewardship. Hudson Valley are best known for their beautiful artist-design seed packs (Art Packs) that appeal to gardeners, gift buyers, and lovers of art and nature.
These Art Packs, most fundamentally, tell stories. Hudson Valley challenges artists to convey in a manner that is fully their own, the history and meaning of the seed variety contained in each pack. These stories were once integral to traditional societies-stories of seeds were often origin stories for entire communities and peoples, and the lore and beliefs that accumulated around seed varieties reflected the nearly familial way in which gardeners and farmers regarded their crops. Our society is, by and large, no longer connected to plants this way. But we like to think these Art Packs help to stitch our fragmented world back together: useful seeds, evocative art, both equally valuable to our experience of being human.