Tag Archives: gardening tips

Attracting Pollinators: Part 3

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Food:  A pollinator garden, with carefully chosen plants, will provide pollen and nectar for pollinators, but you can also supplement with special feeders for birds, hummingbirds, and even butterflies with Butterfly Feeders.

Water:  Birds, bees, butterflies, all living creatures need water!

 Make a Butterflies mud puddle!
For butterflies:  Butterflies are attracted to water along the edge of rivers and creeks, which provides them with salt and nutrients. You can create a “mud puddle” watering station for them. Use a shallow dish such as a plastic or terracotta plant saucer in a sunny area of your garden that is protected from the wind. Fill the bottom of the pan with sand, gravel, and a few small stones, add water to the dampen sand.

Bees: Bees drink water, but they also gather up to a gallon of water a day in hot weather to create “air conditioning” to cool the hive. Bees can drown while gathering water, so it’s important to provide them an escape; this can be done by adding pebbles, rocks, wood, or other types of “bee rafts” into a dish of water, birdbath or bucket of water. Bee rafts can be anything that floats like wine corks, small pieces of wood even packing peanuts.

Birds: provide a bird bath, a dish of water, install a water garden or a fountain.

Submitted by: Carlotta Lucas

Attracting Pollinators: Part 2

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 Grow Organically

Pesticides, even organic ones, can be toxic to bees, beneficial insects, birds, animals and other organisms.  If you must use pesticides then take the organic approach, it’s a safer method.   You can also work with nature to control pests and diseases by using plant ecology and soil management, such as planting disease-resistant plants, practice companion planting, rotating your plants in the vegetable garden, and applying organic fertilizers and mulch. These methods create a healthier garden thereby creating strong plants and creating unfavorable conditions for pests.

Shelters

All pollinators need shelter to hide from predators, get out of the elements and rear their young.

Ways to create shelters:

  1. Leaving a dead tree standing for butterflies, native bees and birds to make homes.
  2. In the fall don’t rake your leaves out of your flowerbeds. Many beneficial insects use leaves for winter protection. You can shred your leaves then put them back into your flowerbeds as mulch, this benefit plants, worms and insects.
  3. Also in the fall, leave dead flowers standing. Many beneficial insects hibernate or lay eggs on flower stems and leaves. Birds also feed on the seeds, so wait until spring to clean out your flowerbeds.
  4. Provide undisturbed spaces for pollinators to overwinter. Leave a log, or a pile of pruned branches lying on the ground in a sunny location, even a pile of leaves can create a winter shelter.
  5. Providing a natural habitat is best, but creating artificial nesting boxes are can be helpful to pollinators, especially in the case of Mason bees, bats and some birds.
    • Mason bees will use a wooden block for nesting if it has the

      Insect house in Parkend, the Forest of Dean, UK (photo from Wikipedia)

      proper-sized holes drilled into it, or you can build a fancier Mason Bee House.

    • For mosquito control buy or build a Bat House.
    • Click here for Birdhouse Plans
    • Butterfly houses can be built or purchased but they are less successful than creating natural habitats.