Create a Backyard Pollinator Garden

A Pollinator Garden is filled with Life! Increase your veggie garden harvest by planting native flowers that beneficial insects, bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and birds will enjoy. Many native flowers have been thought of as weeds to be removed, such as clovers, mallows, lantana, and butterfly weed, but are in fact the best plants for food and shelter for pollinators. 

 Native plants, which are adapted to local soils and climates, often require no fertilizers, less water, and provide a variety of flower types for pollinator food throughout the entire year. The use of pesticides has caused a wholesale destruction of insect life, including bees, butterflies, and beneficial insects. Nonnative exotic plants have become an invasive and poisonous presence in our landscapes, crowding out the native plant communities and the wildlife that depend on them.

Invite Birds to your garden by planting native plants: like toyan or elderberry bushes to provide berries; cosmos or sunflowers for a nutritious buffet from summer to fall. Put a solar fountain device in your birdbath. Add a bird feeder.

Honey bees are not the only bee that will pollinate your veggies, flowers, berries, and fruit trees, there are many species of native bees also. Fill your garden with native plants, like bee balm, plant pollen-rich spring blooming flowers, like calendula, and grow blue and purple flowers, like lavender, as bees can see ultraviolet light. Add a shallow dish of water with rocks for them to sit on and refill often.

Invite Hummingbirds to your garden with tube shaped flowers, like foxgloves, columbines, and honeysuckle. Fill your Hummingbird feeders with one part granulated sugar and four parts boiled water. To increase visits from Hummingbirds fill and clean your feeders often and consistently.

Attract butterflies to your garden by planting long booming and tubular flowers. Butterflies need host plants, like Native Milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, dill. They also want nectar plants, like butterfly weed, alyssum, day lilies, verbena. Many of these also attract bees and hummingbirds. Create a butterfly puddle with clay and stones in a shallow bowl of water.