Most growers, at some point, start to deeply understand the connection between food production and pollinators. It then becomes a goal to bring in those pollinators into your garden!
There’s lots of ways to get there, but our hands down northern favorite and “biggest” pollinator magnet has been wild raspberries. Starting now and increasing steadily through the season, our raspberries bring in more pollinators to our gardens than any other flower or plant that we grow. It’s not even a contest.
Thus, we’ve strongly encouraged several clusters of wild, northern raspberries across our property.
A lesser known fact about bees is they will often seek out a specific type of pollen. A given flight will often focus on a single type of flower, exhausting the supply as much as possible. Despite this, it is still highly beneficial to grow a lot of different types of flowers, fruits and flowering vegetables.
Say what you will about the intelligence of “bugs,” we’ve observed that our gardens become more and more “popular” with the local pollinating insects based on the quantity and diversity of flowers we grow. When you have a diversity of flowers, you can capture the interests of those pollinators on whatever kind of “pollen mission” they might be on.
The bee population can decidedly ebb and flow from year to year. In the north, where many bee varieties are highly dependent on humans to breed them nearby, we like to think that we’re in a bit of a competition to get those bees to come into our yard versus our neighbors yard. Thus, we grow a lot of flowers and try the best we can to become a “pollinator magnet” among our fellow gardeners.
Soon, we’ll be re-introducing our “Flower Fridays” that we’ve been known to do in the past. Our blooms are starting to come on strong and we have a lot of different flowers to share with you all!
