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Pollinator Gardens
122 Plays1 year ago
On this episode of Hort Culture, we're buzzing with excitement to be talking all about pollinator gardens!
We'll dive into the fascinating world of pollinators, from bees and butterflies to hummingbirds and even bats, and explore why they're so vital to our ecosystem.
We'll then get our hands dirty and learn how to create a pollinator haven in your own backyard, no matter the size of your space. We'll cover:
- Choosing the perfect spot: We'll discuss sunlight, moisture, and other factors to consider when selecting a prime location for your pollinator paradise.
- Planting powerhouses: Learn about the best flowering plants to attract a variety of pollinators, including natives that provide essential food sources.
- Designing for delight: We'll explore creating a beautiful and functional garden that not only looks stunning but provides a year-round buffet for our buzzing buddies.
- Beyond blooms: We'll discuss additional ways to make your garden a pollinator haven, from providing shelter to avoiding pesticides.
So tune in and join us as we learn how to create a vibrant garden that benefits both pollinators and ourselves! It's sure to be an episode that leaves you blooming with knowledge!
Plant a Native Pollinator Garden
Attracting Butterflies with Native Plants
Kentucky Pollinator Protection Plan
Pollinator Episodes - Forestry and Natural Resources
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
00:00:16
Speaker
what is up hort peeps hello everyone what are we got our true leaves we haven't brought about our true leaves in a while when you say what is up at the beginning are you addressing us or are you addressing the audience i mean i i like to pretend the audience is just here in the room with us like so should we i guess should we respond or should we just let it hang in the sides i think you should do whatever your soul tells you i like
00:00:42
Speaker
This question is directly at you because the people listening cannot respond. I'm sorry, maybe in the future. Feel free to respond quietly to yourself. Quietly to you. Does anybody else do that when they listen to podcasts?
00:00:56
Speaker
somebody says like, think about this and you actually do it in your brain and go through that. I also like make fun of people when they say silly things or like I laugh really hard and say that was a good one as if they could hear me.
March Resolutions and Personal Relaxation
00:01:11
Speaker
Well, I was thinking, you know, we're still
00:01:17
Speaker
So it's March. If you're listening to this outside of March, right now it's March in our timeline. So you're in a different timeline than we are. But I always think this is the time of year when people sort of give up or forget about.
00:01:34
Speaker
I thought I was the only one. All right, March, I'm out. March, we're done. It was a good run. You've already peaked out for the year and you are done. I can see where this is going. Oh, man.
00:01:53
Speaker
They let go or forget of what like something that they were going to. I don't want to call them resolutions, but maybe something they were really working towards or like the word. A lot of people, I think pick words that they want to say guidelines because it's guidelines. So kind of thinking of it from that perspective, what's something maybe good that you've done for yourself?
00:02:16
Speaker
Lately, we're going to say what we had already failed at. So I'm glad you could also tell me that and then tell me what you've, we've done in response. So I, well, this isn't going well. I mean, this is not going well, but is there, is there something that you have done for yourself?
00:02:34
Speaker
I feel like this time of year is the time we need to remember to keep up with those things. Re-commit ourselves. Yeah, thank you. Re-commit ourselves to that. So I- Renew the vows, if you will. Yes. So on Sundays in the morning, I have Sunday morning for myself. Usually, I'd go out in the morning and do that, but I've been reading while I eat my Cheerios in the morning, and then I don't go outside until about noon.
00:03:00
Speaker
Maybe that will change in the summer and I'll have to be like an afternoon person because it's really, really hot. But that's something that I've been really trying to keep up with and having a little time to myself to do whatever I want in my pajamas and I don't feel guilty about it and I don't fold laundry and I don't do any of the things I have to do. I do something that I want to do. So is anybody doing anything like that?
00:03:21
Speaker
Well, I assume when you're reading you have a book because otherwise it was just you and the Cheerios just be like, ooh. Yeah, reading the Cheerios. I mean, sometimes you could read the back of the box. I see. Oh, yeah. Got us there.
Maintaining Routines and Focus
00:03:37
Speaker
I would say for me, it started before last year and it's just kind of a little bit more of a balanced approach to eating regularly, not too much, not too little throughout the day and moving a little bit and reading some things that are for like an academic program thing that I'm doing and for my general kind of engagement. And I've had kind of fits and starts of doing that more regularly and not, but those things do ground me pretty regularly.
00:04:07
Speaker
So yeah, those are some things that I've been, I'm still committed to and I'm recommitting to in front of, uh, three witnesses live studio audience. You have, uh, you have witnesses now. It's serious. It is. What about you guys? Uh, I'm trying to think, uh, Josh, what do you got? I don't make a lot of resolutions, but I want to do, I guess, but I don't verbalize them because that sounds like a commitment. What do you guys see? Just before the break, the Christmas break in the new year, I started,
00:04:37
Speaker
making it. So the first thing I did in the morning was to stretch for about 10 minutes. And I've been keeping that up a couple of days that I've been like sick. So I just kind of had decided to rest on those days. But I would say every day since like, uh, late November until today, I've only missed like maybe five days. Nice. It's been good.
00:05:03
Speaker
Yeah. When you first said, what have you been doing? I was like, nothing, but that's how much of a routine it's become. Good. Yeah. You gotta have something, right? You gotta vocalize it so you do it. One of the things I said, I was going to try to be better is be more present in the moment. And Jennifer and I have talked a lot about that as.
00:05:22
Speaker
uh, whatever I'm doing, uh, because I don't know for me, or maybe it's for others as well. Multitasking doesn't always work for me. That means I do five jobs, even worse than I would do one job. So I'm trying to be in the moment for what I'm doing at that time. And, and it's just, I guess it's, I've read a lot of, um, works here lately on natural work pace and workflow and not comparing yourself to others and the productivity they may or may not experience because everyone's different.
00:05:51
Speaker
But I've been trying to work on that and it all goes back to this concept of being in the moment, whether you are working on something at your job or doing something at home. And for me, it impacts things like my ability to sit down and read a book because I've kind of come out of the habit of that a little bit and I always was a reader and that was a relaxing thing for me. And I'm trying to get back into things like that, even though it takes time and you have to kind of be in the moment for that. But yeah, I've been doing trying to be more in the moment.
00:06:20
Speaker
in, you know, focusing on singular tasks, because I seem to do better at that. Yeah, that's one of the things I'm trying to work on a little bit. It's kind of it's kind of wild how how many different faith and philosophical traditions tend to have some component that centers on that exact practice of being present. There's like a real wisdom in that of like, okay, all these people have all kinds of things they disagree about. But the idea of presence and existing in the here and now and the moment, it's kind of a common a common theme through a lot of those
00:06:51
Speaker
The other thing about reading, I think, is that it has this way of transporting you and giving you perspective in a very, it feels to me like a unique kind of way that, you know, I think we, several of us have had a kind of a rough start to the year in a number of ways and it's easy to kind of get caught in the,
00:07:14
Speaker
in that cycle of thought and in the moment that you're in now, if the moment that you're in now is a really difficult one, which is important to sit with, but I found that when I started reading more again, it took me to this place of like, oh, I'm connected with other people across time and obviously relationships are important, but I think that's a really
00:07:33
Speaker
Reading in particular what you said Ray jumped out at me about about that.
Pollinator Gardens and Their Importance
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, and Alexis. Oh, sorry good Oh, no, I was gonna say that is tough and I was taking it for granted Doing a simple activity like reading that I used to just take for granted sit down read 100 pages
00:07:48
Speaker
I was not giving that the time because it does take time and focus and I caught myself doing things like listening to audio books. I do that in the car lot because that is one of the few times where you have to be present at the moment or it can be kind of dangerous. I was using that as a crush and I still love audio crutch. I still love audio books but now I'm trying to get back into that old habit of reading and still listen to audio books.
00:08:13
Speaker
Well, Alexis earlier mentioned reading the back of the Cheerio box. And so it's, you know, anybody can read anything. But, you know, one of the things I remember from being a kid in the back in those days on the Honey Nut Cheerio boxes, they would often have information about bees and bees, uh, strange behaviors, their dances and things we don't understand. They had the cute little bee on the box.
00:08:40
Speaker
And bees have kind of come to the forefront of a lot of conversations about conservation and about all these other issues. They are one amongst this group of different organisms that we call pollinators.
00:08:54
Speaker
And there it is, people, if you've been wondering how long it'll take us to get to the episode topic. And there it is. Oh, is that what we're talking about today? It's been a while since we've all been together. Yeah. Well, I just, sorry, I just thought that it was, uh, I know everyone's excited and we're, I'm excited to talk about pollinators with you guys as well. But, uh, it hit me the other day that just kind of to remember to,
00:09:20
Speaker
you know, do something that you said you were going to do and that it can be nice to kind of recommit to those things, even if you've not been doing a good job of it. So recommit, but now we're committing to the idea of pollinator gardens, pollinators and, or I like, I'm, I want to rephrase them to like, I don't know, beneficial gardens or something. Cause I think the more and more I have learned about beneficial gardens, the more I've learned that it's not, or
00:09:50
Speaker
beneficial insect gardens, it's not just insects that can do a lot of good things for us. In the garden or even in a farm setting on a larger scale, we're seeing people on very large scales like agronomic crops are starting to put in. And by agronomic, if you're not familiar with that term, we're talking like large corn, soybean type of things most of the time when we talk agronomic crops.
00:10:15
Speaker
They're starting to put in these hedgerows and areas of native habitat to attract a lot of beneficial insects, beneficial birds and things like that that'll encourage those kind of IPM tactics we talk about a lot in their field.
00:10:30
Speaker
So like these ecological zones, sometimes the artist formerly known as Butterfly Gardens or Pollinator Gardens, now we're just expanding the scope. We're going to represent it with a symbol, just like Prince did, as it just transcends. Yeah, I like that. So where do we want to start with that? I think, you know, we could start at the beginning, we could start at the end. I guess why. I mean, pollinators, we just take for granted, they're super important. I mean, for a lot of our food crops,
00:11:01
Speaker
Sometimes you just have to start with the why and the why is really easy for pollinators because they do so much for us in our food system. Not only that, not only in food crops, but wildflowers, lots of other plants. Basically for the reproduction cycle of plants, pollinators are incredibly important. Not just bees. There's over a thousand like, uh,
00:11:21
Speaker
types of species of bees here that's native in the US, but it's also butterflies, like Brett mentioned. But it's things like hummingbirds, flies, beetles, wasps, all those things are pollinators. So I love that we kind of expanded this discussion today from, we originally kicked around the idea of butterflies, but pollinators kind of takes into account so much more. And when we talk about pollinators, the why is easy, I think, because they are so important to us for just everyday life, so.
00:11:48
Speaker
Even just to riff on Alexis's appeal to include non-pollinating beneficial organisms as well. I think there has been a general move toward understanding, approaching agriculture and horticulture.
00:12:08
Speaker
in as opposed to trying to create these sanitized sterile environments devoid of all everything that's not the crop toward understanding like actually if we can grow and simulate some aspects of more natural ecologically balanced systems.
00:12:26
Speaker
There's a lot of benefits that come along with that. Alexis, you're talking about other things besides just pollinators. You're talking about the birds. I don't need anyone pooping on my car, so that's not all I can do. I love that you said that sanitizing because I had this wake-up call relatively recently in my growing career and I've been trained as a horticulturist.
00:12:48
Speaker
It's kind of always been the sanitize, sanitize, sanitize. And it's not to say that you shouldn't keep your areas clean, that you need to make sure that you're doing things to protect for disease and insects. But this idea, like you said, going back and microbes aren't always bad. We can help encourage microbes to do all of these things, but also working with
00:13:11
Speaker
these beneficials and thinking of it as more of a habitat for anything. So not only pollinators, of course I work in a world a lot with cut flowers, so really we don't want our flowers pollinated because that really
00:13:25
Speaker
takes away the vase life and things like that. So ideally, I'm not necessarily looking for pollinators as much as I'm looking for beneficial insects that are going to feed on those bad insects. Or my new fascination is with birds that are going to feed on like beetle pests that I have.
00:13:45
Speaker
in flowers and in veggies, we get a lot of, you know, cucumber beetle, Japanese beetle are really, really bad. And how do I increase the bird population? You know, the smaller birds that are, you know, can be out in those fields that are getting at that, but also things like spiders when it comes to larger beetles, like Japanese beetles, which are horrible for just about every, everybody, you know, even little garter snakes will feed on them. So how do we encourage these
00:14:14
Speaker
predators, whether they're insects or mammals or something, to feed on these bad bugs, so to speak. So that's like my new huge fascination is with birds and those
Beneficial Gardens and Conservation
00:14:31
Speaker
types of things. A lot of our podcasts- Snakes eating beetles right in front of you. Specifically, I want to watch it.
00:14:36
Speaker
I would love nothing more than to watch a little house run, just dive bomb and eat all of those Japanese beetles. I think that would just make my day. We have a little pair of kestrels, uh, that, that are at the house and they like Japanese beetles and the like fly through and eat them in the grasshoppers and stuff. And that's just always so satisfying. Hmm.
00:14:59
Speaker
Your disdain for Japanese beetles is well established and I love it. I think I've talked about my disdain for them in the past and how I put them on pikes.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yes, that's Alexis the Impaler, I believe is right. You can go back to past episodes if you're new here and want to hear about that. There's an episode about the impaling of the Japanese beetles. But yeah, so we're thinking about these pollinator habitats. And the cool thing is, I think the big thing is, is that if you're like, well, all I have is a butterfly garden. Well, guess what? You also have a beneficial insect garden. You also have a pollinator. You also have a habitat.
00:15:38
Speaker
What we did and what we branded sort of is like butterfly gardens. 90% of the time was doing work for probably a lot more than butterflies, right? Like butterflies were coming, but you were doing good work for all of these other beneficial insects.
00:15:54
Speaker
that we have and therefore everybody higher up the food chain. So if you have a butterfly garden, great. It can get even bigger and better if you want it to. And if you don't, you're still doing the good work. So I think that's the cool thing when I talk to people that...
00:16:11
Speaker
They're, they're like, well, I only have this. And I'm like, that's okay. The bees like the same things. So, or the, it's an interesting wrinkle within just within how we communicate conservation practices to the broader public is that it's always easier if you have a seemingly is always easier if you have a mascot.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah, so so it's like I have a monarch way station and I go out and I just smash every eastern swallowtail that comes in and bears feed and it's like no you I mean you don't do that it's right but but it's and like the whole thing too with like the saving the bees is like this very very particular focus like on honey bees and yet we have all these native exactly we have all these native bees that look crazy. Yeah you're seeing honey bees yeah.
00:16:54
Speaker
I, a couple of years ago, I was out prepping the garden and I was moving some, we just kind of fold down and leave the extra stems and stuff down. Great habitat, great habitat. And I started pulling them out and I felt the ground like buzzing and like all this sound. And I was, it was a nest of bumblebees. And I never went through entomology. I never realized that bumblebees. They're so cool. Like nest in the ground. And they have these little eggs that look like little, look like boba tea.
00:17:25
Speaker
And that was a cool little, yeah, it does not, it doesn't slurp up the straw quite as easy. But that was a cool, just like a little cool experience for me, but just echoing what you're saying, the branding of these habitats and these practices, which has done, you know, a lot of work to get people with normal, typical yards or whatever do that stuff, sometimes sells short just what the actual broader ecological impact of these things are.
00:17:53
Speaker
So yeah, so we're talking pest control and pest management, more balanced pest populations. We're talking about pollination. We're talking about in the case of birds, in some cases they're going to eat seeds and they're going to spread those plants to other places. So a lot of different benefits.
00:18:16
Speaker
If I haven't started yet, do we want to think how might one get started with this?
Starting Pollinator Gardens: Seeds vs. Plants
00:18:21
Speaker
I was going to say getting started. That's the number one question, isn't it? And the good thing I think about the thing I love about pollinator gardens and first thing we'll establish about pollinators is that they are absolutely sun loving.
00:18:35
Speaker
Most of the pollinators, I'm just assuming that you're starting with a full sun area because pollinators are sun-loving. But the cool thing about starting a pollinator garden to me is that you can start them from seed, depending on the plants. If you want an easy start, you can start with seed. Now, there's certainly a lot of plants that come to mind that
00:18:58
Speaker
that you can get transplants for the more woody perennials. But that's a good thing and you probably don't need a lot of area. I've seen a lot of really cool pollinator gardens that are in containers. Folks that had just a small containers of plants on a patio and that was their little kind of pollinator paradise. So every little bit helps. So it doesn't
00:19:21
Speaker
you don't have to start big even though you know some of the bigger plantings you may have you know greater success with the greater numbers of pollinators you don't have to have a big area to get started and once again it can start with just a pack of seeds and a little bit of space on the ground somewhere so not too difficult and don't be daunted by getting started and if you need help with even finding the seeds or getting the seeds or choosing the seeds
00:19:47
Speaker
There's even lots of programs that help you get the proper seeds, and there's even some programs that can offset the cost of purchasing some of these seeds, I noticed. On a state level and a national level, we'll try to include some of those in the show notes for you guys. Getting started is not too terribly difficult, so don't be stopped by that. It's interesting, Ray, that you say you
00:20:10
Speaker
think of seeds as kind of like an easier route. And I'm the opposite. I love starting seeds. It's like one of my greatest joys in life is seeing the seed sprout. Hashtag how nerdy are you? But I always think that putting in plants that are more established and not going now, there's a greater investment, obviously. You have to look at that way. Yeah. I was looking at the money outlay. Yeah. But that's true. That's true. But I love going in and you kind of get more of an instant impact. You know what?
00:20:39
Speaker
what weeds are, what's a weed and what's not, at least in this case scenario. But I think the one thing, go ahead Brett. I was gonna say, the one thing what you're thinking about when you think about deciding on what you're going to grow, and we'll put like some links in the show notes to some stuff, but
00:20:56
Speaker
Diversity is the biggest thing. So diversity, not only in color of your blooms, but also like your quote unquote shape of your plant. So you want, if possible, if you're growing in containers, that's totally fine, but you know, you want things that are mounding, some things that are tall, some things, and then variety in bloom time, especially if you're focusing on pollinators, right? The more variety of bloom time you can have,
00:21:24
Speaker
the more you're going to keep those pollinators around. So I think that thinking of it as a variety is really important no matter where you're starting. Yeah, because what a bee may enjoy is going to be completely different than what a hummingbird would enjoy. Like a bee is looking for the blues and the yellows, the simple flowers with single layers of petals,
00:21:47
Speaker
Whereas honey birds would enjoy something like trumpet, honeysuckle, or columbine, or the tube-shaped flower. So you have to even understand if you have a specific need to attract a certain type of pollinator, be sure to do your research on the plants for that because not all pollinators look for the same type of flower. That's very important. And butterflies have their own thing. They love the reds, orange, and yellow.
00:22:13
Speaker
blooms, they love things like zinnias and marigolds and all the flowers like that. But a lot of it goes back to entomology and just understanding kind of what the insects specifically look for. So we talked about the different types of pollinators, the bees, butterflies, honeybirds, things like that. So just kind of keep that in mind that each set
00:22:34
Speaker
has their own kind of requirements for what they're looking for in nature. And then that speaks to the diversity Alexis just mentioned. And if you have a wide diversity of pollinator plants, you stand a better chance of attracting a diversity of pollinators to those pollinator plants. So yeah, it's a good point, Alexis.
00:22:54
Speaker
I was going to say, Alexis, if you need me to give you any tips on scarification and stratification, seed starting stuff, I know that we're starting out. I'm happy to do that offline. I don't know. I was going to say we should do a whole episode on a very specific seed because we've done seed starting. If you are new to starting seeds, we do have a past episode on that.
00:23:15
Speaker
All of those extra things of that, like, if you don't know what scarification or stratification is, we could do this whole episode on those. And Brett has probably more experience in that way. That's not true. That's not true. It was meant as a bit that was meant to the bit because I'm giving you credit where credit is due because I have done a little bit. I've, I've deferred to Alexis expertise, but I was just trying to get her eyes out of her because she's done all kinds of crazy propagation and other things.
00:23:43
Speaker
Listen, I love music propagation. It soothes me in a way that I cannot. No other anything can soothe me in the way, like propagating in my greenhouses. It's just like, I said, good stuff. That's that good, good stuff. One thing I was going to say in response to Ray's comments there about some of the color differences and
Pollinator Preferences and Plant Selection
00:24:03
Speaker
stuff. So butterflies
00:24:06
Speaker
they actually, not so recently, but somewhat recently discovered even more advanced, they have way more advanced color-based eyesight than we do. So we have a set of three, a typical, you know, functioning human eye has a set of three different types of rods that can see reds, blues, and yellows. And the,
00:24:31
Speaker
Butterflies can see like a bear. They're very basic ones have six different color photo receptors and they've discovered ones that have up to 15 different photos. Meaning that within that spectrum of where we're seeing three different colors and recombining them with our brain, they are actually seeing entirely different spectra of colors.
00:24:54
Speaker
So like I just want to see, for one day I want to see flowers the way that butterflies see them. Oh my gosh, yeah. There's a cool Radiolab episode maybe 10 or 15 years ago and it was talking about like the mantis shrimp, which is like the top dog as far as seeing different spectra. They can see all kinds, they can see like infrared light and like all this other crazy stuff.
00:25:17
Speaker
I would not encourage mantis shrimp in the butterfly garden per se, but it just does add like, you know, we see three different flowers and they're all pink, but a butterfly is actually seeing these different spectra. Another thing I was looking at too, just as a supplement for this was like, I'm always fascinated by the flight of butterflies because they'll kind of do this like,
00:25:39
Speaker
looping around and apparently they can see different flowers up to like 50 meters away that they're kind of wanting to go and like specifically hone in on but they'll also like can seemingly they don't really understand the flight pattern necessarily but can somehow know that other patches of flowers are like up to 200 meters away as they're kind of traveling through and it's crazy kinds of information but
00:26:07
Speaker
but just a wrinkle on the Not just the colors for the what they're feeding on but a lot of these species also have these symbiotic relationships with the plants There's just so much crazy cool information Floating around in the natural world that we through our limited sensory organs don't actually directly access now this thing to raise point the different color like the bees just kind of like this color of flower is like such a cool and
00:26:34
Speaker
So much goes into it. Yeah, it's crazy. I would say the other tip that I would give if you were planting, you know, outside of pots, something maybe a little bit larger of an area. I'm not talking anything crazy is to group your plants.
00:26:54
Speaker
That's a good one, yeah. If you're buying or sowing a seed of something to put everything like in one area. So coneflower echinacea is a really big one that people like to plant and are pretty familiar with. And so instead, you know, say you buy three coneflower.
00:27:11
Speaker
Instead of putting them in like a triangle around the garden, put all three of them together, you know, with proper spacing. But when you think about it, remember, we often think about our gardens like in a visual, what's visually appealing to us. And we think, oh, we'll spread the love, spread things around.
00:27:28
Speaker
But I want you to think about it as the insect that you're trying to attract, you know, whatever pollinator or beneficial you're trying to attract is they're very tiny. A lot of our good bugs don't fly. And so, and even if they do fly, they're still very tiny. And so they want a short distance as possible to get from things to thing. Uh, so really kind of clustering those plants, uh, and you can create like some really pretty waves. You can still make it very visually appealing by clustering these, but putting them together.
00:27:57
Speaker
is a really big one for that. And then I wanted to point out if you're wanting to do something larger, because we like to on this podcast have something like every episode could be for both the commercial grower, larger scale grower and the homeowner, right? Because I think we can all work together and we're all doing a lot of the same things. But if you are maybe a little bit larger or you're a homeowner who has some space that you want to kind of take up and do some good habitat for,
00:28:24
Speaker
going in with something more like hedgerows. One thing that I want to do, I've got some hedgerows at my farm, but adding in a few more, it's okay to put an area of hedge in the middle of your field if you want. Yeah, it takes some planning, but if you're putting that hedgerow closer to those crops that you want to have protected, so say you want them to eat the Japanese beetles and you want the wrens to be nesting around, putting a bird bath out there or
00:28:53
Speaker
even a water source for the bees. Bees need water. So putting water sources around the crops that you want to protect or pollinate would be super beneficial. And so kind of popping those in close by, whether they're annual or perennial. And then things like, you know, we've talked a lot about cover crops and cover crops are, I swear, just growing and with possibility. And by the way, Josh, I used the calculator the other day when I was buying.
00:29:19
Speaker
We have a cover crop calculator through CCD, and I used it the other day to buy some sorghum sedan grass. But choosing cover crops that can support your beneficials as well. So buckwheat is a really great example. Bees love buckwheat. You can buy buckwheat honey. So if you're really into the bees and you want to have a garden, you can use, and everybody wins, right? You're getting the cover crop benefits, but you're supporting the pollinators.
00:29:46
Speaker
It's an annual crop. You don't have to, it incorporates really easy. Like there's so many good things, but there's a lot of ways. Buckwheat honey will be the most unique honey that you will ever eat. There's two camps with buckwheat honey, those that love it and those that do not. And I enjoy it. To me, it's almost got a taste reminiscent of sorghum just a bit. Like molasses or sorghum. Yeah, kind of a molasses sorghum cross. But yeah, it's an amazing crop. And I love those places in the US that have a lot of buckwheat when
00:30:13
Speaker
where you can buy that dark buckwheat honey and it makes an amazing health square. I wanted you if you're maybe on a little bit of a larger scale and you're wanting to put in some habitat or pollinator area to kind of think of it. You don't necessarily have to think about putting in
00:30:29
Speaker
a bunch of Cone Flower, if you're not a flower farmer, that's not super beneficial to you, but if you wanted to put in some windbreaks, right? And so there's money through the NRCS to put in some native windbreaks that are great habitat that'll bring in those pollinators and then using those cover crops. So it doesn't always have to be like you're taking a valuable space for a cash crop or that you could be using for a cash crop. There's ways to use it for both.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yeah, along those lines, whether for the bigger scale or the smaller scale, I had been looking into some...
00:31:03
Speaker
documentation on site selection, you know, as they talk about windbreaks and, you know, places that are somewhat sheltered from really harsh, harsh weather are recommended. But something else that was noted was they said the ideal site in this Tennessee publication was one that's undisturbed generally by the traffic of people with pets. But also, I thought this was brilliant, open to your view so you could like
00:31:29
Speaker
you know, thinking of your garden or your space is somewhere that has vantage points and your observation is going to be really key in the management and learning about what is being attracted to this space, what's coming in, how it's behaving. Well, that was really smart and usually overlooked. Not only for me to be the touchy feely guy on the podcast again, one of my favorite things to do in the summertime is to watch bees and birds and
00:31:58
Speaker
butterflies work, you know, like we're watching thing. I kind of like mesmerizing, but watching them work. So we have like this, um, this group of goldfinches that comes through every fall when the, uh, some of the cone flower and stuff is, is, uh, has set seed and they just go crazy and just like strip it all. And they're just, they just are so happy. And like, it's like a turning point in my year now that we've had that in for almost 10 years, I guess now. And.
00:32:25
Speaker
They know it's there. It's really cool to see that cyclical thing. But watching bees work, you mentioned the buckwheat. Oh, man, a field of buckwheat and like hums like you will hear it. Yeah. Oh, my. It's like I just get a little umbrella set up there. I don't have a field of buckwheat nearby now. But when.
00:32:44
Speaker
When I used to work at the farm, we'd have some out and I would just go and sit up there and eat lunch and watch them. It was so cool. I just loved it. I did a lot of buckwheat last year and I had a buckwheat row right next to the row I was picking in and I was picking and I didn't have my headphones in and I was like, what is that noise? I just could not figure it out and I was like,
00:33:07
Speaker
You know, no one else is here. I kind of got a little freaked out at first because I was like, what is this humming noise I'm hearing? Where is like a fan blown out on my tunnel? Like what's going on? And I finally realized it's the bees working the buckwheat that I was right. You know, my head was down in there and I was like, oh, well, this is good. Amazing.
Native vs. Non-native Plants
00:33:27
Speaker
Yeah. Another another just side note to you on like I was mentioning, we have some different things out in our yard that we've put in for this purpose.
00:33:34
Speaker
And a lot of the native stuff, once the perennial native stuff, once it gets established, it is like seemingly bulletproof as far as there'll be times where we go through a period of drought and everything. Even like some of the stuff that you'd expect to be pretty robust is looking rough without additional water.
00:33:52
Speaker
And they just, to borrow from the bee thing, they're just humming right along. You wouldn't even know that we haven't gotten rain for a long period of time. The roots go down super deep. It's retaining soil. It's retaining water. There's a whole lot of other benefits there. I thought you started kind of a little bit of the conversation of some of the species, Alexis. Do we want to kind of popcorn out some species that we see or people tend to like and give some hot takes? Yeah, I mean, I'll start. I'll start. Echinacea. Overrated.
00:34:23
Speaker
Wow. There's a time and place for it, but things didn't like it. I actually grow a lot of Echinacea. We have Echinacea too. I just feel like Echinacea, that's cone flower. The purple cone flower is probably the most visually iconic. That's the native species, yeah.
00:34:41
Speaker
what people think of i just feel like it much like monarch waystation got like this weird preferred position in like the minds of people and don't get me wrong i'd much rather see them put in some echinacea than not but i just think it's a big flower that appeals to our visual senses and to butterflies and it's a i mean and to pollinators and so and and birds as i mentioned but i i think
00:35:07
Speaker
There's a lot of other opportunities, a lot of other things to look around at if you're just getting into the wildflower native pollinator species. That's all. I think that I could change you, Brett, only because I grow several different species of cone flower that are a lot
00:35:26
Speaker
a lot more fun, I think, and not color-wise, necessarily. I mean, they're still kind of that pinky-purple color, but their movement, they're not that sturdy, rigid, like the Tennessee Cone flower, Echinacea tenensiensis,
00:35:42
Speaker
It has like 18 N's and S's in it. But anyways, so it gets really tall, very like they're the ones when the wind blows. They're just like kind of moving like this. Well, you can't see me if you're listening. They're swaying in the wind. And they have that pretty, yes. So I think I'll have to have you out.
00:36:06
Speaker
This is June when everything starts. I'm not actually, I was just trying to start some controversy. I'm not actually. He is totally starting the pod. So I think that I need to start this conversation with you should plant your native. So what might be native for Kentucky might not, if you're not in Kentucky, you need to look up your native plants. If you're trying to attract native pollinators and you know, habitat for birds and things like that, you're going to look for native. So here, you know, we tell people gold, there's
00:36:35
Speaker
three, four different species of goldenrod that are all native to Kentucky. Uh, it is also our state flower, but there's a lot more, like I have a wand, it's called wand goldenrod and it doesn't bloom until after first frost. And so what it does is help those pollinators who are trying desperately to finish, you know, maybe collecting pollen or whatever that is. And there's seed much later into the year. Uh, so I leave that up and it is like a fluorescent neon yellow and it gets like
00:37:05
Speaker
five foot tall and it's not aggressive. A lot of people think of goldenrod. They think of an aggressive plant. So it's one of my favorites, especially if you want some color like in your gardens late in the year and November it's blooming. So that's a really cool one that you can do and it is a native year. So really thinking about those species, but like goldenrod is one of my favorites.
00:37:26
Speaker
Baptistia is another one. If anybody's, it's also false indigo. Yeah. False indigo. It comes in lots of different colors. One thing about colors that I haven't mentioned yet, I'm going to mention here. So if your goal is pollinators, like specifically pollinators who are going to feed on
00:37:46
Speaker
like a nectar source or a pollen source, because not, you know, there's plants that are just like Brett said earlier, host plants, right? They just need the eggs, or if you're just trying to bring in things that might eat the leaves, whatever. If we're talking about things that want the pollen or the nectar, it is better to use a straight species. And cone flower is a really great example of this because- What does straight species mean? Yep, that's what I'm gonna talk about. So the purple cone flower, as an example, is, let's see, echinacea,
00:38:16
Speaker
I have to look that up. But then if you go look at, you go to a garden center and there's orange echinacea and white echinacea and there's all these other really cool Mexican, there's all kinds of really cool fluffy ones.
00:38:33
Speaker
are they great for your soil? Will they do a lot of those things that the natives do? Yes, but a lot of that selective breeding has bred out those nectar and or pollen sources. So if that is your goal, go with the straight species of something and an easy way is that if it's named something fancy. So if it's
00:38:57
Speaker
Like called what's a giant or something giant or a gold baby. Golden rod is a good example. Gold. And it's, and it's in quotes. It'll be in quotes. And so what that means is that one has been named and is bread. Uh, so that's one way to kind of look at it. It might have a little copyright thing on it where you can't propagate it.
00:39:19
Speaker
You can certainly mix those in, but your straight species are going to be the truest native. They're going to be the best for pollinator habitat.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah. And they tend to be the ones that are marketed as like wildflower seed or native plant seed or native plant. Yeah. You'll see a lot of those, uh, featured on the Kentucky and we covered this in a previous episode, but the Kentucky native plant society is a wealth of information on a lot of that on what Alexis is talking about. And they even have a section on pollinators because it's always great when you can cross reference pollinators with the natives and the natives have all those benefits that Brett and Alexis were talking about with being locally adapted and
00:39:57
Speaker
and tend to deal with our local weather patterns a little bit better. But yeah, check out that if you've not already done so. The references for that will be an episode or two back, I think in the podcast. You want to know what my favorite native plant is? That is love wasps, like little, the beneficial wasps and not necessarily the ones that are going to sting you, but the ones that'll go after like the bad caterpillars and stuff like that. Yeah, a little brackenoid. Yeah. Yeah. My favorite ones. And they're so pretty. Those wasps, man, they're gorgeous. They're so shiny.
00:40:26
Speaker
Anybody want to guess what my favorite one is? I've probably talked about it. Deal. Deal with tracks. No, but um, bulls, um, bull flowers are great for habitat, uh, pollinator habitat. Any guesses? No. No rattlesnake master. Oh, oh yeah. Google that right now. Everybody listening rattlesnake master do it. Even if you're driving Kentucky plant, it looks like it belongs in the Arizona desert.
00:40:53
Speaker
I love it and if you grow cuts or you do anything cool like that, because obviously growing cut flowers is cool. Rattlesnake Master and it does not look like it belongs here but it's wonderful.
00:41:08
Speaker
Surprisingly adaptable to our clay soils. It does like a dry area. So if you've got one, it's great. And it gets this white ball, like a, it looks like a, like a gabe plant and it gets this stem and gets these white, very round balls on the top of it. That's the bloom.
00:41:28
Speaker
And so it's one of my favorites and it's real edgy, real cool. Ray, you said, just like Alexis said, Goldenrod, you know, people think is a plantus non grata. You mentioned one earlier that I thought was bad. You said something about some kind of honeysuckle, right?
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's if you're trying to attract specific ones, but the trumpet honeysuckle, there's lots of different types of honeysuckle. Be very careful, even though they may attract pollinators, they're not necessarily desirable, like the bush honeysuckle, the emerald top. We don't necessarily want that, but there's vining honeysuckle, and then there's the bush honeysuckle that's much more
00:42:05
Speaker
aggressive. But now, because they do have a trumpet-shaped flower, they do attract pollinators. So there's good and bad within that grouping of plants, so be careful with that. Because some of these that may be good at attracting pollinators, they still may not be necessarily desirable if you're looking to stay with the native, more non-invasive plants.
00:42:29
Speaker
I think the trumpet honeysuckle is Lona Sarah Sempervirens, I believe. Yeah, you're talking about the one that is desirable. Yeah, you've got the good cousin and the bad cousin. Yeah. It's an interesting thing that I had to learn once I got into the... I was like, wait a second. People just say honeysuckle. Yeah, you're scared. I'm afraid. Yeah, unfortunately, it's in a bad light a lot of times because the bush honeysuckle, the invasive type.
00:42:52
Speaker
I hear honeysuckle, unfortunately, being all grouped into the bad guys list, and that's not necessarily the case. We have even been contacting honeysuckles. Yeah, we do. Those are totally desirable, and I believe that even people that plant super common things that are awesome for butterflies, and this happened to us last year. Jennifer did not plant, my wife did not plant a butterfly garden, but that's what it ended up being because it was zinnias and marigolds.
00:43:19
Speaker
which obviously it was going to attract butterflies and I had never seen butterflies in our community but I saw tons of butterflies down next to the kind of a creek that we plant the garden by and it was awesome and she would just love to go down there and look at those but I think it's an important point here that if you are home gardener and even though you're not
00:43:40
Speaker
Planting a pollinator garden specifically, but you enjoy plants like zinnias and marigolds. Be very careful with your use of pesticides because you are going, and insecticides specifically, because you're going to attract these things just naturally. They're going to be attracted, especially if you've planted, as Alexa said, group or mound plantings.
00:44:00
Speaker
big plantings and monoculture of these these types of plants. So just kind of poisoning the buffet poisoning the buffet. Yes, that's the salmonella on the buffet that you don't want. Exactly. But I believe sometimes people naturally just they don't conceptualize their plantings as pollinator gardens. But that's essentially what they're doing, because they are planting plants that attract these things. And when I see that, and I'm out in my local communities, I kind of especially if those
00:44:26
Speaker
those plants particularly are oftentimes planted next to home gardens because they're easy to grow and they're just kind of a standard garden plant a companion plant a lot of times i see those but you know when we're growing food crops that we may necessarily have to involve the use of pesticides to control certain insects that would destroy those food crops and that's when i enter into that discussion i'm like oh yeah specifically because you've planted these rows of flowers next to your tomatoes be super extra careful on your timing and bloom period
00:44:55
Speaker
And if you can, you know, spray when there's not wind around. So I really encourage people to be careful because I see a lot of times those specific flowers around gardens for whatever reason, they're kind of old standards and I love them myself. They're really easy to grow. Something the something yours is any Zinnia and Marigold comment made me think of some of the things I think we've said throughout the whole series of podcasts is that.
00:45:17
Speaker
There is a whole line of people who are like native plant purists and it's like, if it's not native, you shouldn't, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily feel that way. I think that there's good opportunities for all kinds of different plants. I obviously would steer people away from invasive and damaging things. But like, if a plow, if a flower produces nectar,
00:45:38
Speaker
It kind of by definition is a beneficial pollinator. Right. To some guy, yeah, to somebody, some insect. And like Alexis was talking about having the straight species plant, you know, of the echinacea or whatever. And then we have both, you know, we have a big patch of.
00:45:54
Speaker
regular purple coneflower and then we also have little selections of some of the other ones just because we like the look of them and they're cool and guess what? Absolutely. I mean, bugs do get on them. It's not like when they go crazy in some of the other sections, but it's pretty cool. But it's just one of those echoing like
00:46:10
Speaker
We aren't trying to create any or foster any shame based anything about all you have. You don't have any connection to the native stuff and you want to try something else. That's cool too. Josh, you got any species that you're particularly jazzed about? I really kind of became a chancer with like purple Joe pie weed when I was. Oh yes. That's good for flies and beetles. Everything loves that stuff. I mean, it's good stuff. Yeah. Little Joe, if you're wanting to. Compact. Yeah. Yeah. There's a compact version. Little Joe.
00:46:39
Speaker
But that sounds good. It's so pretty. It's the prettiest mauvey pink.
00:46:46
Speaker
It's sort of like a relative, even the short ones, relatively long stem with a big kind of like brain shaped rounded, you know, dome of small flowers, right? That's how you would describe it. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. It's cool. It works really well. Like if you, if you're talking, Alexis was talking about like layering heights or working with different heights, the tall ones get pretty tall. They can get like 10 or 12 feet tall. You can put that again on a fence row as kind of a backdrop, a fence line or something like that as a backdrop or as a, you know,
00:47:16
Speaker
seasonal privacy fence if it's dense enough even But that's a good shout Josh man. I knew you'd come up with something
00:47:23
Speaker
You were saving that just for that moment. It's, it feels exotic yet folksy at the same time. I know.
Garden Preparation and Maintenance
00:47:31
Speaker
I was trying to think of some common, not failure points, but common challenges that I see before we run out of time here with people that are, you know, wanting to establish a good size little planting at home from seeds, Alexis, or transplants, I guess. Gosh.
00:47:47
Speaker
I know, but I guess we are talking about, you know, especially if you're talking about seeding or putting in transplants or of some kind or another, is that it does take some prep work, just good kind of horticulture principles. A lot of times I see people that do very well with these plantings. They're modest planting, maybe 16 square foot or whatever, but they will address like weed pressure to enable establishment easier. And they'll do that
00:48:15
Speaker
In a lot of cases, I recommend a lot is like solarization with a heavy piece of like black plastic. Put that on early in the season and you'll naturally through heat processes, you know, do some weed bed sterilization and that's great prep work. But I guess my point being that it does take some prep work. It takes sole disturbance.
00:48:36
Speaker
to get those seeds in the ground and eliminate competition to the point where they can get established and that the same goes for transplants Alexis mentioned mulch that's really important as you're putting in these woody perennials mulch does a couple things it suppresses competition while that's getting established and preserves moisture but I think people that do really good with these plantings they do their homework and they prepare a seed bed
00:49:00
Speaker
to get these pollinator gardens up and going. And I think that's the ones that have the best outcomes are the ones that put that prep work in.
00:49:08
Speaker
Prep work and I, I tell people two years worth of weeding, like two years worth of active weeding. After that, it's usually once or twice a year. But if you, if you do it, the work up front and keep on top of it for those kinds of first two years, and sometimes you might be weeding out some of those plants that get a little crazy, you know, sometimes you'll be weeding out some rebeccy or something like that.
00:49:35
Speaker
keeping that and then I think it's okay to remember that it's in some cases, depending on where it's located at, it might look a little messy. All right. Some of these plants can wild. And that's a common failure. People will go clean that up at the end of the season. I'm like, well, we have to really think about what we're doing. Now realize that a garden may get unruly, except for English gardeners. They love unruly for some reason.
00:50:04
Speaker
Yeah, cottage gardeners. And you guys have alluded to this several times during the podcast today is you need to leave that. You don't necessarily need to deadhead because that's also a habitat. It's seed from birds at the end of the season. And if you need to do some of that tidying up, wait till late in the season. We're talking about- Like right now.
00:50:24
Speaker
Yeah late winter early spring, leave the habitat in place and Brett you mentioned that you had, what did you say you had laid over and provided habitat? Yeah all kinds of stuff but like a compass plant has a big beefy chunky stem. Any this time of year when she's getting cabin fever she goes out and does what she calls stomping the yard which is just basically walking around stomping and breaking up the stems and kind of creating a mulch area.
00:50:54
Speaker
You know, we actually don't remove them at all anymore, but it is. It is nicest time of year to get people out. I think another another another thing I would add to the prep thing or the planning thing is like pay attention to how big these plants are going to get. I think people sometimes put them way too close together, hypothetically, me. I might have done that before. And then it's like you have if you want a wild look, a really wild look, have them up against each other and competing and trying to spread and everything else.
00:51:24
Speaker
It's a whole, it's a whole vibe, but yeah, that would be another thing I would add to the prep and planning is that some of these things can get pretty big. Yeah. Yeah. You want them to spread and fill in that way. The weeds are there. Like that's the.
00:51:36
Speaker
That's the ultimate goal, but... A couple of other popcorn species I would throw out to just take a look at, you know, if people are looking to get into the seed catalogs or whatever. One I love is things in the genus Liatris, L-I-A-T-R-I-S, Blazing Stars, sometimes it's called. They have this really cool long spike of flowers. A lot of bees really like those. Is that also the firecracker plant in there? I can't remember what they call the firecracker. I'm not sure. No, Gay Feather is Liatris. That's it, yeah.
00:52:05
Speaker
In the genus Asclepius, the milkweeds, so there's like the traditional kind of
00:52:14
Speaker
Swamp milkweeds, the big pink flowers, but there's also the butterfly, what is called butterfly weed, which is confusing, but it's like a butterfly milkweed. It's a little orange flowered asclepius tuberosa. That one's a lot less aggressive, so that's the one I recommend. Totally. It's a pretty plant too. It's very attractive, I think. The milkweed claim to fame is that it has a chemical in it that the monarch butterfly
00:52:39
Speaker
Caterpillar when it emerges eats and then it has it's like a natural kind of defense mechanism and so there's this this relationship between milkweed and Monarchs that you have to have you have to have those if you want to qualify as a monarch waystation or whatever and
00:52:55
Speaker
And then the other thing I'm going to give a shout out to predictable as a tree guy, do not underestimate how important tree flowers are to all kinds of trees in general. I think we can show them a lot of love, but there are tons of butterflies and birds and other insects that have like an obligate.
00:53:15
Speaker
relationship with these tree flowers. And especially in this early season, we were starting to see things open up here. Maples. Yeah, totally. All those, like planting trees, like deciduous trees that flower is another component of providing that habitat and providing that food. That was something I didn't understand until I really started learning more about trees. And so that's a pretty cool aspect of it too, along with some of the woody perennials as opposed to the things that dive back to the ground and all that.
Incorporating Pollinators in Existing Gardens
00:53:44
Speaker
Yeah, so those are those are a couple of the fun ones that I see a lot of a lot of people star anis, I mean, sorry, anis hyssop is hyssop hyssops are really cool that we played some of those last year for the first time.
00:54:02
Speaker
But I always like having a little smattering of things to look through and nerd out about if you're thinking about planting stuff. It's a lot of pretty stuff out there so you can really incorporate. Lavender, yeah. I've got a friend who, the house she bought has got a very formal, it's Boxwood Nandina Holly's, like very formal garden.
00:54:21
Speaker
And she was like, I'm going to rip all of this out. I was like, you don't necessarily need to rip it out. Like if it needs to go, it needs to go. But what, what we started doing was, you know, leaving the stuff that was so healthy and incorporating like hiss up. She's got hiss up in Veronica, like snuck and then, you know,
00:54:37
Speaker
in there. So she's got these blooms and she's mixed them into this very formal English garden style planting. And I've convinced her not to take out her hollies because I use them in the winter. But so it's very selfish of me. But yeah, so it's like you don't need to necessarily rip everything out if that's what you're working with. Just incorporate some things into your general landscape if you don't have space for a separate garden area. That's totally cool.
00:55:07
Speaker
They're in some Lantana for the butterflies. I mean, it adds color and diversity and goes a long way to breaking up a row of boxwoods or taxes or Junipers. Yeah. Lantana. Lantana's one of those. I always see butterfly every time a Lantana starts. Oh yeah, that's a good one. How many birds like it?
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah, it actually changes color. So those individual florets, you know how they, you know, our middle might be yellow and goes red. So once the bee has pollinated that individual floret, an indicator, it will turn color so that the bees no longer see it with their like light spectrum and they will know to go to a different and not waste their time. And I was like, I've grown to love it. Yeah, it's a neat plant. Is that how we get broccoli florets?
00:55:50
Speaker
No. That's a different. Sorry. Not as colorful. Not as colorful. Rockley is a flower. Oh. Okay. Okay. Period. Period. All right.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:56:02
Speaker
Well, any other lasting impressions or tips or tricks or where, you know, and no means all, we've all got kind of different realms of how we've done. There's no wrong way to do a pollinator garden or a habitat area. So, you know,
00:56:17
Speaker
experiment do what feels right for you if you have more questions you can contact us but any any lasting thoughts friend if you if you have friends who have pollinator gardens in many cases if they've had them for a couple years like we have stuff will have set seed and spreads and there will be a lot of yeah a lot of baby cone flowers and and
00:56:41
Speaker
milkweed and all kinds of stuff that is actually, Alexis mentioned, weeding some of that stuff out. Well, weeding is also can also be called transplanting if you do it in the right order of operations and put it in the ground. So, Brett is inviting you to his home. You can come anytime during the day. Come and reap what our garden has sown. Open invite.
00:57:02
Speaker
Awesome. All right. Well, I believe that'll do it for the day. Thank you for being here with us. Uh, if you liked this episode or any of our other episodes, please feel free to leave us a review. Uh, it feeds the algorithm that is the evil algorithm to help more people find us and hopefully learn something and, you know, have a laugh with us once in a while. So we're glad you were here today when, and we hope that as we grow this podcast, uh, you will grow with us and, you know, feel free to contact us anytime. Have a good one.