Easy Plants That Attract Bees and Butterflies to the Garden)

Want to know some of the easiest plants to grow in a pollinator garden so that you can bring all the bees and butterflies to your own kitchen garden space? That's what we're going to talk about in today's lesson. It's going to be full of flowers, full of fun, full of bees and butterflies. So let's get into it. Welcome to the Gardenary channel. Garden plus ordinary equals gardenary. So whether you're a beginner gardener or you're a garden pro ready to start your own garden coaching business or somewhere in between, Gardenary is the place, excuse me, for you. So make sure you subscribe to the Gardenary channel. Hit that bell so you get a notification every time we put out a new video because why wouldn't you want to do that, right? And stay tuned because we've got tons of growing inspiration for you all season long. So let's get into this video and talk about the super important, super duper important part of your garden, the pollinator garden. Let's do it. All right, let's kick it off by talking about the sourcing for your pollinator plants. So I highly recommend finding your plants from a local grower rather than a big box store and also being sure that your plants are grown naturally and organically, not with synthetic fertilizers. The whole point of a pollinator garden is to give tons of great, delicious, healthy food to bees and butterflies. The last thing you want to be doing is giving them plants that have nasty synthetic stuff in them, right? So a great thing to do is to focus on a local grower to ask them how they grow their plants or for you to start your own plants from organic, natural, maybe even locally grown seeds. So all that I'm going to show you in my pollinator garden was either started for directly from seed by me or bought from the local farm and local organic farm in my area. So I know these plants are good stuff. So make sure you prioritize that. I would rather you plant just one plant that's locally and naturally and organically grown than plant 100 plants that are sprayed with, you know, nasty stuff that the bees and butterflies aren't going to love. So let's kick it off with this one. This is a new to me plant. This is called Mountain Mint. So like I said, I got this from a local organic grower who let me know that this was a native pollinator. So believe it or not, this is completely edible, the leaves and the flowers, but we grow this mostly for the bees and butterflies. I planted these by plant last year and didn't get any flowers off of them. Now you're going to see this trend with a number of the plants we talk about today is that a lot of them don't flower in the first year. So we got zero flowers off of this Mountain Mint last year, but you can see how it is just about to break off with lots of blooms this season. We're just in July here and should probably have these blooms opening up in, I don't know, less than a week probably. So this is a super simple, fun one called Mountain Mint. You could add this to your pollinator garden if this is a local plant for you. All right. So next one we're going to do is the famous Echinacea. So Echinacea is really known as a great herb, like a medicinal herb. You can make teas and tinctures and all those good for you stuff. I love Echinacea because it's beautiful. The bright pink cone flowers, that's another word that it's known by, are so lovely. So again, like the Mountain Mint, I bought these from a local grower, put them in the ground last year and got zero blooms from them. So you'll experience this with a lot of perennial plants in your native pollinator garden is that the first year is just kind of a, it's just an investment. So you'll have a lot of green, but not necessarily blooms. So no blooms last year, but oh my goodness, this plant is about to go off this season. So I count probably at least 15 blooms that are about to happen all over this garden. And this one being the first one. So Echinacea is one of a bee and butterfly favorite. You can of course enjoy the blooms too, making your own teas and things. But I love growing it just for the bees and butterflies. So Echinacea is another one. Echinacea is in the Aster plant family, and I've got one on either side. So I'm hoping it's going to give this nice, bright, beautiful entryway to the pollinator garden. So Echinacea is plant number two to add to your pollinator garden. All right, plant number three, this is maybe a surprise, is Cilantro. So I remember when I first started gardening, I downloaded a pollinator garden planting plan and Cilantro, Parsley, and Dill were all in the planting plans. And I was like, what? That's weird. Aren't you supposed to eat those yourself? So the fun thing to know about the plants in the APACI family, so Cilantro, Dill, and Parsley, they all put off these flowers fairly quickly as you move into the warmer seasons. And the bees and the butterflies, and even the ladybugs, they all love these little tiny flowers. Something about their setup just makes it very easy for the insects to get in, to get the nectar or the pollen, and to thrive. So Cilantro is one of those plants. I've enjoyed the Cilantro. I love eating Cilantro. But as soon as it starts to flower, the last thing I do is pull it because it's a great food for the pollinators. And the timing is really cool because a lot of times, most times, Cilantro is going to bloom right around the time that your tomatoes, your cucumbers, your squash, and zucchini need to be pollinated. So it's like a perfect combination where you're not harvesting the Cilantro to eat it, but you're providing food for the bees and butterflies to get them near your tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash when they need it most. So that's the second set of plants, is Cilantro, Parsley, and Dill. All right, right behind this one, I mean, look how packed these guys are in here, is Anise Hyssop. I absolutely love the flower on the Anise Hyssop. Anise Hyssop is in the Mint family, the Lamiaceae family. And you can see how many flowers are coming off of just one main stem. So this is the same plant family as, say, Basil, Oregano, Mint. You can see similarities to the Mint plant family. And these flowers are a favorite for bees and butterflies. I found that Anise Hyssop is a super easy plant to grow in the pollinator garden. Again, I grew these from locally sourced plants, put them in very small last year. They grew and produced tons of blooms. I harvested them after the bees finished up with them. I've enjoyed tea from the Anise Hyssop all winter long, and these all came back. So after the snow and the frost went away, these are perennials, and they popped back up and came back to life in the garden. So that's another reason why I love adding Anise Hyssop, because it just comes back year after year, and there's very little maintenance you have to do to it. So that is Anise Hyssop, another plant to add to your pollinator garden. All right, the next plant I want you to include in your pollinator garden that you probably wouldn't think of as a pollinator is Lemon Balm. So if you missed our other video on how to grow Lemon Balm and why you'd want to, we actually talk about the reason, one of the main reasons to grow Lemon Balm is because of the pollinators. So here it is again, and now at this stage, we're a few weeks after that first video, this Lemon Balm is about to bloom. So above every single leaf node, these plants are starting to create these tiny little flowers, which is going to give tons of food for the bees and butterflies. So Lemon Balm, like the Anise Hyssop right here, is in the basil family, the mint family, and it comes back year after year. So this was actually one of the first plants to return after the frost and cold of Chicago winter. So I know if it comes back in my own garden, it's going to come back in yours too. Make sure you give it plenty of space to grow, because as you can see, this girl likes to take over. So Lemon Balm is another super easy plant to grow in a pollinator garden. Another great plant to grow in a pollinator garden is Milkweed, native Milkweed. So I've grown Milkweed in several different climates in Nashville, Tennessee, Houston, Texas, and now in Chicago. And in each of those places, the Milkweed looked different. So it's really fun to discover what Milkweed is native to your own particular area. And you want to focus on those plants because that is what's going to welcome the best bees and butterflies and feed them what they're used to enjoying. So this is Milkweed. Again, this is a perennial. So last year, I planted it by plant from a local farm, did not get any blooms. But this year, it's come back. And you can see we're just about to start to get blooms right here at the top of the plant. So it's taken a while, you have to be patient. But once this sets in, we're going to have tons of really healthy Milkweed, hopefully for years and years to come because it is a perennial. Alright, another plant to enjoy in the pollinator garden that's super easy is Zinnias. If you missed our video on how to get dozens of blooms from one Zinnia plant, you got to check that out. But here you can put Zinnias in, I add Zinnias almost all the way through my pollinator garden. And I plant these all from seed. Now, let me just give you a little experience I had last year, I wanted to have a white theme in this garden, not at all thinking about what kinds of I did white Zinnias, white cosmos and white marigolds. And one of my good friends Robin at Honey Girl Grows, she let me know by the end of the season, that white flowers attract moths. So unbeknownst to me, I ended up attracting tons of moths to my garden, rather than the colorful butterflies because I was using white flowers only. So take it from me and don't just grow white flowers, you can mix in some white Zinnias. But you definitely want to have the brighter, colorful Zinnias too, just like my shirt here, you know, I was like trying to bring the bees and butterflies with what I was wearing. Okay, so Zinnias are one of the easiest, most prolific things you can grow. It was the first flower I really had success with in a pollinator garden. And you can grow it from seed. So this is not a perennial. Unlike these that come back year after year, you have to replant your Zinnia seeds or let them reseed themselves, but they will not come back from the root stock. These are what we call annuals. All right, so Zinnias, milkweed, and lemon balm, we're pretty much almost filled up with our pollinator garden, just a few more to go. All right, the next plant to add to a pollinator garden that I think is super easy is dill. So this is dill, obviously, and it's already going to flower. So like I said, parsley, dill, and cilantro are great plants to add to a pollinator garden, even if you're not eating from them. So I've enjoyed this plant, harvesting from it to eat from it, and now the bees and the butterflies are going to get to enjoy it too. So the dill plant is actually a host for the swallowtail butterfly. So pretty soon, I'm pretty sure we're going to start to see little swallowtail caterpillars all over this plant. It's going to be amazing. I love just the shape of the dill flowers. I think it adds kind of a whimsical cottage feel to the pollinator garden, and the bees and butterflies love it. So another plant to add to your pollinator garden is basil. So this is another one you might be a little surprised about, but basil, again, is in the mint family or the basil family, if you want to say that, the Lamiaceae family, and I love growing basil, first of all, because I love to have basil myself, but what you'll see is basil eventually will start to produce a flower head, and this resembles what we even showed you with the anise hyssop. So it's this nice tall flower spike that the bees and butterflies just absolutely love. What I like to try to do is grow enough basil so that I can let some of it flower to feed the bees and butterflies, and some of it be just for me, where I keep pinching off the flowers and eating more basil. Super easy to start from seed. Basil is one of those plants, just like the dill, that's annual, so you're going to need to replant it from seed every year or let it reseed itself. It will not grow back from the rootstock like a perennial pollinator plant will, but speaking of perennial, our last plant we're going to talk about in the pollinator garden is yarrow. So yarrow, to me, is one of the prettiest flowers. I just love yarrow. I used to grow some mustard yellowy yarrow, and it's just so gorgeous, so I'll have to add that maybe next year. This is white, obviously, and I bought these from plants, locally grown plants, last year, and just like some of the other ones I talked about, in my first year, I got zero blooms, so just tons of nice, these feathery green fronds. Very healthy plants, but no blooms, and now here we are in the second year. These actually survived through the winter. I even transplanted these out of containers and moved them up here to the pollinator garden, and they are just going off right now. They're just blooming like crazy. Yarrow is a great food. You can see the pollen in these flowers is very accessible to bees and butterflies. It's just right there on the tip, and so it's a great welcome mat for your pollinators. So yarrow, again, is a perennial. Plant it once, and it will literally come up again and again. Your biggest job will be to divide it, spread it out, and give it space in your garden. So that about wraps up all of the easy plants to grow in a pollinator garden. Listen, bringing bees and butterflies into your garden space is one of the most important things that we can do as gardeners. Even if it has zero to do with us producing more food, it's just good for the planet. Bees and butterflies are currently threatened in so many ways, mostly because we're spraying our air with all kinds of insecticides to ward off the bad guys like mosquitoes, but we're accidentally messing up the environment for the good guys too. So when you create a garden space like this near your kitchen garden, planted with locally organically grown plants that are native to the area, you're literally doing good for the whole world. So it's worth the time, and what I've given you today is some of the easiest, lowest maintenance plants that you can add to your pollinator garden. So no excuses, okay? You got to go for it. All right, if you are ready to bring your gardening to the next level, you got to check out my green thumb quiz. Super fast, it's five questions. You can take it in a split second, and the results will show you what we think, what level we think you are at in your current gardening journey, and we'll give you free resources to help you grow to the next level. All right, thanks so much for watching Gardenery, and I'll see you next time.