“We grew flowers for the bees and they gave us flowers for tea.” It really is quite as simple as that.
When Joel and Melinda Marshall moved from the lush Willamette Valley to Central Oregon’s High Desert they had no idea that Tumalo Tea would blossom from the simple idea to “plant wildflowers for wild bees.”
“I believe that some of the world’s greatest problems can be addressed with small, simple solutions.” Just as it is with us, the best way to improve our health is to make healthy food more available. Bees are the ultimate foragers, but if we are getting rid of all the wild flowers that “aren’t for us” we inadvertently spray their favored food with poison and make the problem much worse. The other part is we then will cut down and burn the dried flower stalks from the season before, not knowing that it is the nursery for next years wild bees.
“More often than not, we end up doing the wrong thing, simply because we don’t know any better,” Marshall says. But the more we learn the more beautiful and beneficial our presence on the planet can become.
For example, we just learned that a small presence of sunflowers can radically reduce the incidence of the varro mite that has been devastating bee populations since the 1980s. And as it turns out, U.S. propagation of sunflowers has decreased since the mid-80’s across our landscapes. The best thing anyone can do is plant good food for bees, which in turn, ends up being medicine for us, too. (check out the article here):
https://entomologytoday.org/2023/01/10/sunflowers-reduced-varroa-infestations-honey-bees/
It all started by planting Bachelor’s Button for the bees. When we learned we could make tea out of the flowers, Tumalo Tea was born!
Our goal is simple, to create beautifully beneficial blends that are good for pollinators, people and the planet.