Gardenbite: Creating pollinator habitat at home| #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Ken Johnson, horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension, coming to you today from Jacksonville, Illinois with a garden bite. And on this week's Garden Bite, we're going to talk about creating pollinator habitat in our landscapes. Pollinators are incredibly important. We tend to focus on their role in our food supply, and for good reason.

About a third of the food that we drink and consume depends directly or indirectly on pollinators. Their impact on agriculture in The US alone is around $29,000,000,000 and worldwide it's estimated to be between $2.35 and $577,000,000,000. So plants like apples, broccoli, carrots, cucumber, herbs, all of our cucurbits, not to mention coffee and chocolate, need animals to pollinate them. So without pollinators, our grocery stores would look much, much different than they do now. Pollinators are also important out in nature or in our landscapes.

Pollinators are keystone species, which is a species on which other species in the ecosystem depend on. Over 75% of all plant species rely on pollinators in order to reproduce. Plants that they are pollinating are going to be food for other animals, birds, mammals, other insects. And the pollinators themselves also serve as a food source for many organisms as well. So without pollinators, there'd be far less plant diversity, far less animal diversity in our natural areas or in our landscapes as well.

So what are some different things we can do to help support pollinators in our landscapes? First, we want to provide them with food sources, so flowers that are going to give them pollen and nectar. That's pollinators are going to be feed on. So we want try to choose heavy pollen and nectar producing plants. There's been a lot of debate, on the merits of nativars or cultivated varieties of native plants.

A lot of the recommendations are is that you want to stick to the straight species, not the nativars or the cultivated varieties. But some of these nativars are actually just wild type plants that have been brought into cultivation and given a name. What we want to try to avoid using are some of these cultivated varieties that have been highly modified. Some of these native plants that have double blooms, that makes it much more difficult for the pollinators to access the pollen and nectar. It's also been found that some of these nativars that have different leaf colors, whether it be like purple or they're variegated, are less attractive as like larval food sources to caterpillars and stuff.

So those would be potentially things to avoid. But something is better than nothing. It's better to have some sort of flower in your landscape than nothing at all. And more and more research is being done on these cultivated varieties. The Mount Cubist Center in Delaware recently, or within the past couple of years did an echinacea trial where they looked at some of these different cultivars that are available in the horticultural trade for Echinacea, purple coneflower, and they actually found that the cultivar Fragrant Angel had more pollinator visitation than the quote unquote straight species did.

So in some cases they could be more attractive, than the straight species or just as attractive. So do a little research on, if you're thinking about buying a cultivated variety of a native plant, do a little research on what its origins are. And if any research has been done on the attractiveness to pollinators for it. In addition to providing heavy pollen and active producing plants, we want to try to provide season long blooms and different blossom shapes throughout the growing season. So different pollinators are attracted to different types of flowers, different colors, different sizes, different fragrances, all of that stuff is going to attract different types of insects.

So having a diversity will draw in more pollinators to your landscape. Pollinators are also active at different times of the year. We think about mason bees. These come out early in the spring. A lot of times when our fruit trees are blooming, those populations start declining, and then leafcutter bees start showing up later in the spring and into the summer.

So different pollinators are out potentially at different times of the year. When we think about our typical landscapes, we do a pretty good job of providing flowers kind of in the main part of the season that maybe late April, May timeframe into August, September, where a lot of times we're lacking in our landscapes is in this early spring and in the fall. And those are two critical times. In the spring, have overwintering insects emerging and they need to be able to feed so they can lay eggs, build nests, so on and so forth. In the fall, we have individual pollinators that are going to be overwintering.

So they need to be able to build up their reserves so they can make it through the winter and then emerge in the spring. So we want to make sure we have something blooming in our landscapes, ideally two to three species of plants blooming in our landscapes from March into October. Oftentimes, we focus on native plants and for good reason our native pollinators evolved with these. But many of our ornamental plants, our annual bedding plants, our herbs can also be good sources of pollen and nectar. So don't feel like you need to rip all of these out and go all in on native plants.

You certainly can if you want, but again, things like cosmos, zinnias, sedums are not native plants, but they still do a good job of providing pollen and nectar for our pollinators. Trees can also play an important role. Trees and shrubs, we think about early in the year, things like maples and stuff are blooming when not a lot of other things are. So trees and shrubs can again provide a lot of that pollen and nectar for pollinators at times where we may not have a lot of things blooming. So if you've got the space, think about incorporating blooming trees or shrubs into your landscapes for pollinators as well.

When it comes to planting, we want to try to plant in clumps rather than single plants. Groupings or masses of plants are going be more attractive to pollinators than solitary plants here and there. Again, something is better than nothing, but if you've got the space and you can do it, try to mass your plants together to make your landscape more attractive to them. We need to be willing to accept plant damage when it comes to our plants, in our pollinator plantings. Leafcutter bees will cut up leaves to line their brood cells with.

Those annoying caterpillars eating your plants will eventually turn into butterflies and moths, which many of us are trying to attract. So we have to let these caterpillars feed on our plants. Let the leafcutter bees cut up your leaves. Let the beetles feed on your plants. If we want to have these pollinators around in our landscapes long term.

We want to provide habitat for nesting and egg laying. This is particularly important for bees. So providing layers in the landscape, shrubs, tall grasses, low growing plants, different pollinators occupy different niches in the environment, trying to provide small patches of bare ground. 70% of our native bees nest in the ground. A lot of times in the horticulture world, we push mulch, we want to mulch everything.

Mulch is going to help with soil moisture retention, suppress weeds, things like that. But if we mulch everything, and I am as guilty as anybody of doing this, we're eliminating a lot of the habitat for our ground nesting bees. Again, 70% of our native bee species nest in the ground. We need to provide habitat for them if you want them to stick around in your landscape long term. The other 30% of our native bees nest above ground, often in cavities or hollow flower stems.

So if we're cleaning up our garden, leave flower stalks behind, leave 12 to 18 inches of flower stalks behind. A lot of our smaller bee species will excavate the pithy centers out of that and use that to build their nests. And if you're concerned with that looking bad, once those plants start growing again and start putting out leaves, they'll cover up those stalks you leave behind, and you won't be able to notice it. We can also leave dead tree trunks in your landscape, obviously make sure they don't pose a threat to people or property or structures. But if you can, that can be habitat for wood nesting bees, think carpenter bees, maybe they'll use that dead tree snag instead of your deck or your siding.

Beetles can also potentially utilize these dead trees and stuff. We don't want to be in too big of a hurry to clean up our landscapes in the spring. It's been rather warm this year, unseasonably warm this year. We've had summer like temperatures several days already early spring, but we want to give pollinators a chance to emerge before we start cleaning up our landscapes. Ideally, the earliest we would do this is kind of mid April and even better if we wait until mid May.

Once low temperatures are consistently in the fifties, most pretty much all insects will have emerged by then. So if you can wait that long, that's when we should start cleaning up our landscapes. Kind of the same time we would start planting tomatoes. Realize that's not always possible. You may not be able to, but maybe city is after you to clean up the homeowner association, what have you.

But ideally wait until mid April before you start cleaning up. And if you do focus on maybe the more noticeable areas. If you can leave the backyard kind of wild until May sometime. We also want to rethink the use of pesticides. If we are going to be providing habitat for pollinators, we probably shouldn't be spraying or plants we're planting for them at all.

We're trying to draw insects in. It doesn't really make a lot of sense to start spraying insecticides onto these plants we're trying to attract insects to. However, that may be a little different story on our, maybe our vegetable garden and stuff. So if we are going to be using pesticides, we want to make sure we're not applying to plants when they are in bloom. We don't want pollinators being exposed to this stuff.

If we are applying, we want to apply when pollinators are going to be less active. It's typically going to be around dawn and dusk, particularly for bees. And we want to try to avoid drift and runoff. So making sure we are applying those pesticides properly so the pesticide is not drifting on to other plants, potentially exposing pollinators and other insects that we are not trying to manage. And when you're picking your pesticides, try to pick things that are going to be less harmful to pollinators or things that are more specific.

So if you're spraying a tomato plant for hornworm caterpillars, look for BTK, the bacillus thuringiensis kurstakii, that only affects caterpillars. It does not affect other types of insects. It won't do anything to bees, beetles, and so on. So try to pick more selective stuff. Smart pollinators are not necessarily going to be affected by it.

So these are a few things we can do in our landscapes to make them more attractive to pollinators and hopefully have pollinators stick around long term in your landscapes. That's all I've got for you for this week. Thanks for listening and keep on growing.