BORING LAWN To DIVERSE POLLINATOR GARDEN — Ep. 121

So just a couple days ago, it's actually beginning of September now, but a couple days ago we saw the Canada geese flying south already so we think it's going to be a pretty early winter which is good but it's also a shame because we are planning to get quite a bit of work done outdoors but a little bit harder when it gets really cold and really snowy. But we came out this morning because the pollinator garden looks great in early morning light but we have some clouds now too. But I wanted to show you just the updates on the pollinator garden. It was really hard to imagine that it could be this robust especially because in early May, I believe that's when we were out here last, it was very close to the ground. I mean the phlox were blooming. There's some phlox actually still blooming down here. Here I'll show you. Surprising how some of them will actually put out some flowers later in the season. Right here those little white flowers down here with little pink centers. I was surprised to actually see that in flower again. The thyme has really started to spread so as some of the clover that I haven't planted that just kind of moved in here. One of the plants that I have fallen in love with and I actually ended up getting some more is this liatris microcephala. So microcephala means small head and that's referring to these flowers right here because they're quite small. So if you're familiar with some liatris, here I'll show you this one over here. I actually have many different species of liatris and they seem to bloom at all different times which is very nice to have them across the seasons. So here's another one. I can't remember what species this one is. And then you have one that's over here that surprisingly is way past its bloom which is funny because when I got this, this is a cultivar, this isn't a straight species, this is kobold. And when I got this, this was one of the first things I planted with this eutrochium and with this turtle head. This one was blooming at the same time but this year it bloomed very early and it was done. So I was shocked by that. I think it just goes to show you that sometimes if you have like cultivars they don't always like maybe sync up with their appropriate pollinators so it's also good to actually get some of the straight species that are regionally from your area so that they could provide a pollinator source sometimes for those specialist pollinators that come out. And speaking of specialist pollinators, I've actually been tweaking this garden some. Of course I've been tweaking it because this is two months away from being one year old. You could see that it's pretty robust already. In May it didn't look like this but I've been interplanting now here and again in some of the gaps so that none of the weeds start to move in. But I've started to add more yellow flowers and so has our resident chipmunk because he's been planting sunflower seeds. This one's about to bloom. He's been planting sunflower seeds, you can see some over there, all throughout the garden. So I enjoy having a community garden with the animals here so I'll let him do his thing. Some folks have been chopping off the heads of the sunflowers so eating off the heads of the sunflower. You can see one all the way down there by the coreopsis. It's decapitated and I think that is on account of our groundhog eating the heads off the sunflowers. So I'm hoping they get tall enough so that you know they might be able to reach the leaves but they can't reach the head and then we'll actually have some sunflowers throughout fall and winter which will be great for the the songbirds. What I've been doing with this garden on specialists, specialist pollinators, is that I've been learning a lot more about specialist bees and specialist pollinators and really what I mean by that is that these are pollinators that rely on the pollen sources of a specific family, genus, or even species of plant. So they co-evolved with these plants and there was a recent report out in New York called the Empire Native Pollinator Report and it just has showcased how much our specialist pollinators have declined and that's due to one habitat loss and also just eliminating those pollen sources that I was mentioning. Now you might see pollinators come out like certain butterflies or moths and they'll land on any flower and those are more like generalist pollinators and they're sometimes there for the nectar but the pollen is what has all that protein. That's what they use in order to be able to raise their broods. So that's how I've been tweaking not only my pollinator garden but other gardens here because as I was doing an inventory of the plants that I've been growing here I realized that I have over 81 percent of the plants are specialist pollinator plants so I was like okay well I won't get to 100 percent this year but let's try for that let's aim for that and let's you know get some of those plants in number so you know that's why I added some of these helianthus which is also a specialist pollinator plant as well and there's a few others that I've added through here but like this grenadilla it's called gum plant these are really small right now because I just bought them as like little plugs but next year hopefully they will be more robust. So I think what you might be seeing here is not everything in bloom because this is not only it's not a year old yet I think in two to three years it's going to be far more robust. Something else I'm really excited about it's just starting to put out its inflorescence. I love this grass this is called mullenbergia capillaris. It's very hard to see it right now but this will start to put out an inflorescence and it'll get like so airy and so beautiful so that when the light comes through and the light is not coming through this morning but when the light comes through it'll almost look as if it's just like a gauzy haze and so when you look through the garden you could see through it but it'll be kind of this purple haze that you're looking at the flowers in the distance which will be very nice. You can see the echinacea purpurea is pretty much getting past their bloom so they're looking a bit tattered and then these are some penstemons here we just had a bumblebee visiting them and these are much low growing penstemons compared to you know some of the our native penstemons and this is a phlox paniculata. This has been in bloom for a little while but it's getting past its bloom it's been a really great pollinator plant here for us. Typically when the sun is full on that's when you start to see the the pollinators come out. It's still a little chilly in the morning and like I said you could feel that like the autumn is coming on. Now this area I have not planted a lot and you could see you you have a lot a lot more weeds in this area and there's a couple reasons for that. One the main reason is that if we put run an electrical line from here we're gonna have to take up this part of the garden so the only thing that I planted was basically this andropogon jowardii which is called I think it's called blackhawk or I can't remember the cultivar name but it gets a nice purplish red color and then I have some lupine here some lupinus. Here's some heads that have been decapitated of chippy sunflowers and then this is agastache and they have so many different colors of this and I find it to be a very beautiful plant. Smells great and also the pollinators love it. We have quite a bit of cultivars in here I'll try to point them out and you can see that they vary in color. This was just a couple stems when I first planted this. You probably could recognize it from its seed pods or the milkweed bugs that are on it. They're already they're still mating so late in the season. This is an Asclepias incarnata so this is like a swamp milkweed got much thinner leaves and I was really excited to see that we had three monarch butterfly caterpillars that were on this eating it so that was doing its job. Now this is looking a little bedraggled. I planted a bunch of colmia. This is our native colmia and or mountain laurel. I think it gets way too much sun here because the one that I planted under a deep shade looks so much healthier so ideally we would plant around this to kind of shade it out a bit more but because we left this open it's not getting quite a bit of shade so we'll have to kind of leave it like that because it doesn't really like to be transplanted colmia so I might leave it there. I might have to take it out we'll we'll see. These are some I think this is a rain lily that is still kind of hanging around which is neat. It's another a bold plant and then here's some other agostachy. You could see again just the riot of color here. It's got coral with these raspberry throats and a much bluer green leaf and this will spread and that's the kind of ideas to just not have much barren earth here but to have these plants spread out and then hopefully I could then divide some of these plants and this will be a nice place for me to divide plants and maybe put them in the meadow. So one of the things that you'll notice about this pollinator garden is I do want to keep this pathway relatively free and and not have it too overgrown. So aside from the sunflowers that our chipmunk planted I've tried to keep the plants a bit more low growing here so you'll see that you'll have a lot of the elfin creeping time. I need to remove a lot of these grasses that kind of come and move in and then you'll see that we have quite a bit of succulents here and then lower growing plants like that armaria some over there that are still in bloom the scabiosa you have the organum which is the ornamental oregano and then you start getting slightly taller. This is a beautiful cultivar of coreopsis lanceolata so I've tried to go with these like soft pink coral cerise colors in this garden with some brighter riotous pinks and some deep red velvet purples but then also I started to say okay well those whites and those yellows really punctuate it very nicely. This is not a native verbena but wow it attracts so many pollinators from butterflies to our hummingbirds. This is verbena bonariensis and then we have our native vernonia over there which is our ironweed the other purple so we have quite a bit and then we have our potentillas here these are like shrubby syncopoiles and these have been these were eaten down actually by somebody maybe the spongy moths but and then our rose our rose is going through some stuff because I think it's either a chipmunk or a vole or something has burrowed down there and I've tried to cover it up multiple times but they keep on kicking it back out so I'm like okay you could have your hole. This is the only thing that has been I think misguidedly planted this is a dahlia and I thought it was going to be pink but I guess it didn't turn out to be that way so I probably misplanted it here it could have been better in in another garden this garden has provided some real interest I think you know for the for this this area for those of you who are tuning in and seeing this just now I mean this was a process I mean this didn't exist before it was just lawn so I'm very pleased how this has turned out it now has increased to about 257 different plants in here so species or varieties of plants and I'm just so pleased being able to look out of the windows in the morning to see this to see all the birds and the insects interacting with this and I think it'll only get more diverse as the seasons unfold as we start to see all the plants emerge throughout the seasons and also to figure out what other plants that need to be planted in here for specialist pollinators and that will definitely be an episode that we'll cover in the future on specialist pollinators because I really highly encourage people who have gardens to plant for the wildlife to plant for the insects sometimes we plant gardens with the idea that we don't even want nature around us and so I think that planting the garden to attract that nature to attract that wildlife around us will only bring in a lot more joy for us and look the light is starting to come out right now so it's starting to dazzle up the garden pycnanthemum this is a plant that will spread quite quickly quickly and I have this also in the herb garden and I've planted this in the orchard planted this in the meadow and again this might be something that I'm gonna have to cut back quite a bit but again it's such a good pollinator plant it's a little again past its bloom but you'll see some small flies and again that's right flies are pollinators too you have beetles who are pollinators you have ants that are pollinators so butterflies moths you have lots of different types of things other than just bees yeah this is uh this is it this is uh a nice update on the pollinator garden tour we hope you enjoyed the tour through our pollinator garden and if you enjoy tranquil garden tours like this let us know in the comments below and if you are enjoying the films that we produce consider liking subscribing and hitting the notifications bell that will let you know when new episodes release we commit 10 percent of our google adsense proceeds to community projects in the finger lakes area so your support does go a long way have a blessed day and we'll see you in the next episode