7 September 2026
I ran a garden check on my own yard
I keep testing BeeGuide on other people's ZIP codes. This time I ran it on my own yard. Here's every step, and what it said at each one.
My bed is 6 feet by 10 feet, against a fence.
Step 1: what I typed in
Three things from my soil meter, and the size of the bed.
- pH: 6.0 (the app looks half a point either way, so 5.5 to 6.5)
- Water: average
- Light: full sun
That's it. Everything else it works out on its own.
Step 2: what it figured out about my yard
From just my ZIP code it found:
- I'm in Sammamish, Washington, King County
- Hardiness zone 8b — my coldest winter night is around 15°F
- We get 57.8 inches of rain a year
- Last spring frost: about April 5. First fall frost: about November 7.
That comes from ten years of weather records, not a guess.
The frost dates matter later. They decide what month I can plant.
Step 3: the bees
It found 20 bee species recorded near me. Not bees in general. These ones:
Bombus mixtus, Bombus vosnesenskii, Bombus melanopygus, Halictus rubicundus, Osmia lignaria (that's a mason bee), Megachile perihirta (a leafcutter bee), and 14 more.
This is the part I think is the coolest. Those are real sightings near my house.
Step 4: narrowing down the plants
The catalog knows 1,963 plants that those kinds of bees have been recorded visiting. Then it starts cutting:
- 1,459 have no growing data, so it can't promise they'd survive here
- 83 aren't native here
- 36 don't match my soil pH
- 33 would die in my winter
- 8 are invasive, so no
That leaves 344 plants that fit my yard. Then it checks which ones you can actually buy. That's 243.
Step 5: the actual bed
A 6 by 10 bed is 60 square feet. That's not very big. So it put in 3 kinds, 12 plants in total, with 3 square feet spare:
- 5 × blanketflower
- 3 × small camas
- 4 × common selfheal
That's three different plant families. If a disease hits one, the others are fine.
It also told me what it threw out, and why. Whiteleaf manzanita and common snowberry were "too big for a bed this size." American red raspberry was "too wide for a 6 ft bed." It isn't pretending my bed is bigger than it is.
Step 6: the calendar
This is the thing I was really checking. Do these three cover the season, or is there a gap?
- small camas: April, May
- blanketflower: June, July, August, September
- common selfheal: June, July, August
So something is flowering every month from April through September. No gap.
Winter is empty. That's fair, though. The one winter-blooming plant it found me was the manzanita, and that's the one that got cut for being too big. With room for a shrub I could cover winter too. Something for the next bed.
All three go in April–May, or August–September if I miss spring.
Step 7: where to buy them
Last step, and the one I care about most. The plan doesn't just say "plant these." It tells me what form to buy each one in:
- 5 blanketflower — potted plants, or seed
- 3 small camas — bulbs, so I'd buy plants
- 4 common selfheal — potted plants, or seed
Seed is way cheaper, but you wait a year, sometimes two, for flowers. A potted plant costs more and blooms the same summer. My bed is small, so I'd buy plants and actually get to watch the bees show up.
Then it goes looking for places to get them.
Nurseries near me. It found 40 plant shops within 25 miles of my ZIP code. That comes off OpenStreetMap, which anybody can use. The closest is Grey Barn Nursery, 2.2 miles away. Lee Farm and Nursery is 4.7. Squak Mountain Greenhouses is 6.4, over in Issaquah. King Conservation District's wetland plant co-op is 14.2, in Renton.
The catch is that a normal garden centre doesn't stock much native stuff. So I'd ring first and ask, instead of driving out there and being disappointed. Knowing the exact species names helps — I'm not asking for "bee plants," I'm asking for Camassia quamash.
Online, last. There's always ordering seed off a website. It works, and it's the fallback, but it's the thing I'd try last. Shipping a plant across the country to feed a bee that lives on my street feels like missing the point.