Weidner: Creating pollinator habitat in your garden

Here in Colorado, we’re lucky enough to have 1,006 species of native bees, 250 butterflies, over 1,000 moths, 11 hummingbirds, 18 bats, and plenty of beetles, flies, and wasps to pollinate our crops and flowers. With more than 70% of the flowering plants in the world relying on pollinators for fruit and seed production, it’s hard to understate their importance in our ecosystems and daily lives.

Thanks to habitat loss and shifts in our climate, many of these pollinators can find themselves struggling to find the food sources they’ve always counted upon and the shelter they need to complete their lifecycles and bring about the next generation.

In many instances, plants and pollinators have co-evolved over time. Plants will develop certain physical characteristics that make them more appealing and accessible to certain types of pollinators. An extreme example of this is in the case of yucca and the yucca moth who rely solely upon one another for survival. Most ‘specialist’ pollinators will visit a handful of plant species rather than just one, but that still means that if those species are in short supply the pollinator’s survival is in peril as well.

Creating pollinator habitat in our own yards is something that each of us can do to help increase the numbers and diversity of our pollinators and provide the valuable resources that can mean the difference between life and death for them.

The first, and most obvious place to start, is with food sources. Because of the co-evolution piece mentioned above, making a point to include plenty of native plants (essentially plants that were here before European settlement) is an excellent way to ensure that your garden is offering up valuable food resources that many of our Colorado pollinators will be looking for. Since these plants have been missing from our landscapes for quite a while, it may take a season or two before the pollinators really start visiting in big numbers but just wait, they will come. By planting at least three plants of the same species you’ll also be ensuring that the plants will be easier for them to find and more useful overall when the numbers pick up.

While native plants should be a top priority, definitely don’t shy away from including some of the ‘introduced’ but well-loved by pollinator plants as well. Catmint, Butterfly Bush, Blue Mist Spirea, and Jupiter’s Beard may not be native, but they are still much appreciated by ‘generalist’ pollinators who don’t specialize and are happy to feast just about anywhere.

When planning out your new plant additions it’s important to take bloom time into serious consideration. Oftentimes, the summer is rich in flowers, but both the spring and autumn can be sparse. Try your best to cover the entire growing season from early spring to at least mid-autumn. Serviceberries, crocuses, pasque flower, and crabapples are examples of spring flowering options and rabbitbrush, goldenrod, fall asters, and Winterfat can be good options for autumn.

We usually think of pollinators as the plentiful diverse flying species zipping around our yards, but we can’t forget that many of them started out in different stages that could also benefit from our support. Butterflies like the Black Swallowtail feed on dill, parsley, fennel, and carrot when in their caterpillar stage. Other species require hollyhocks, sunflowers, willows, alfalfa, broccoli, and milkweed. Consider planting a few extra of these plants knowing that they’ll likely become caterpillar food and making peace with that from the beginning. This way, if you find any on ‘your’ plants you can just pluck them off and move them to ‘their’ plants and still enjoy a nice harvest or flower show while knowing you’re keeping your butterfly population going.

The next habitat factor is shelter. Not all, but plenty of pollinators overwinter in some form or another and will require a suitable spot to hunker down when fall arrives. Some will require special shelter to complete one of their life stages or the perfect spot to raise brood. The types of shelter that are desired can vary widely but there are several actions we can take to do our best to provide.

In the spring when you are cutting back and removing the dead plants in your garden, instead of cutting old hollow stalks to the ground, try to leave a handful of them between 6-8 inches long. Many insects will use these to lay eggs in and it’s okay if the stalks have pith in them. In no time your plant’s new growth will cover the old stalks and provide more cover and relieve you from having to look at dead stems for very long.

A couple of other things you can do during the early growing season is to be sure to leave a few bare patches of soil in low-traffic areas and put out some nesting material for hummingbirds. We have a lot of ground-nesting native bees who need a nice loose soil to dig a nook into and our hummers will appreciate soft discards like cotton, human hair, fiber, and dryer lint. There are little cages you can buy to put your nesting materials in and hang outside so the birds can use them, but I’ve also had success using one of those net produce bags to hold my materials and just hanging it from a tree branch.

Bee houses and hotels are very popular right now as well, but ensure that you’re following best practices and cleaning them out and replacing components as recommended to avoid passing along disease and pathogens to next year’s inhabitants. Sometimes parasitic wasps and predators can also become a problem in these environments so monitoring them to ensure the housing is still beneficial is a good idea.

Finally, don’t forget water. Providing anything from a shallow basin with rocks for the pollinators to crawl up onto to a full-out pond is helpful and will be appreciated daily by your visitors.

Just know that whatever steps you decide to take, each one, even the small ones, do make a difference!

More from Amanda Weidner: Weidner: What should we choose, xeric, water wise, or native?

Amanda Weidner is the horticulture specialist at the Pueblo County CSU-Extension Office. She can be reached at 719-583-6581 and weidnera@pueblocounty.us.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Weidner: Creating pollinator habitat in your garden in Pueblo