Healthy Sustainable Lifestyle

Pollinator Garden

A pollinator garden is ideally made up of local flowering plants that help attract and feed pollinators such as butterflies, bees, humming birds and a myriad of other insects and animals. I would like to share some sites that I found to have helpful information on pollinator gardens.

Enjoy,

David Proctor

 

 

 

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Pollinator Garden

I have been giving bees a lot of attention lately.  One of the reasons is that I have installed a Mason/Leafcutter house off of my back deck.

   

   

The other reason is that I have ordered a Warre (pronounced: WAR-ray) Hive and will be starting my bee hive in another week or two.

I want the bees to have plenty of choices for gathering their pollen and nectar. So, I decided to try and plant as many local species of flowing plants on my hillside as I can.

My neighbors have beautiful flowering plants that will help the pollinators, but I wanted to learn for myself how to start a pollinator garden.

When doing research on this topic, I found the Million Pollinator Garden Site that is promoting just what I want to do.

“The Million Pollinator Garden Challenge (MPGC) is a nationwide call to action to preserve and create gardens and landscapes that help revive the health of bees, butterflies, birds, bats and other pollinators across America.”  This is the link to the site: http://millionpollinatorgardens.org/

The site explains how you can participate in this activity and get on their map of gardens across the United States.

Another site I found to be very useful has downloadable pdfs that have lists of local plants for pollinators for the different regions of the US.  The link to that site is: http://www.xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/plant-lists/

Once you have downloaded your region, you can see what species of plants attract you and are beneficial for pollinators.  There are many beautiful flowering plants to choose from.

Pollinator.org has an app and guides for Canada and the US.  They are very extensive and tell about most of the local species that can be planted for pollinators.  To view this site, follow this link: http://www.pollinator.org/guides.htm

This goes beyond just wanting to have a good food source for my bees.  If we don’t try to help promote the pollinators in our region, we will have the potential to lose some of our native species and at the least have less productive flowers and plants in our garden.  When you have a chance to plant, plant food for our pollinators and enjoy the beauty.

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Check It Out!

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