I'm not terribly familiar with ground ivy, but a little reading leads me to believe it is used as food and medicine in several different ways. perhaps if you acquire a taste for it, you won't have such an excess.
regarding it competing for pollinator attention: it's possible. there are several ways to address a problem like that. habitat for native pollinators was mentioned by others. that's good advice. many of the natives are, indeed, more effective pollinators than honey bees. in my own
experience, though, even with a large variety of flowers to choose from, honey bees still visit my fruit
trees, though they are relatively small in number compared to other available flowers.
I do keep several beehives nearby, though. if you would like honey in addition to pollination, keeping bees might be something to consider. if you were to house even a single colony of honey bees in your food forest, covering the entire 1/6 acre with ground ivy would not satisfy their appetite, so they would need to visit other flowers, too, even if the ground ivy is the favorite.
consider also that keeping honey bees would not preclude encouraging your native pollinators. a once heard a chap from Xerxes suggest that it's either honey bees or the natives, but not both. that, I have no problem telling you, is codswallop. I grow a lot of flowering plants mostly to help out my honey bees, but I see an almost ridiculous variety of native insects on the same flowers as the honey bees. unless an area is egregiously overloaded with beehives, there's plenty to go around.
.png)
1
