Increase Your Garden’s Productivity With a Pollinator Strip

Hey y'all, I finally got smart. I have decided to bring my five-gallon bucket around in the garden when I talk to you all so that I can sit up off the ground because the ants have been so bad this summer. And y'all know me, I'm always trying to let things stay in balance. I try to manage the ecosystem but not spray every insect in sight. I know they all have a purpose and as long as they're kind of in balance with predatory insects, keeping the pest insects at bay, everything tends to work itself out as long as you have, you know, healthy plants and a good habitat and shelter and pollen and nectar and all of the things that is needed for an ecosystem. But those ants are a bit out of control and I've been trying to treat them a little bit this year. It's the first time I've ever had to do that because they have been so fierce. The red ants in particular, if you get bitten by one of those, they are going to hurt for two or three days, the bite does. But right now really the problem is the smaller black ants and as I walk through the garden they get all over my feet and they just bite me like crazy. And when I try to film and I sit on the ground, forget it, I'm just getting eaten alive. So, got my bucket and I want to talk to you today about this pollinator strip behind me. So, if you've been with me for very long, you may have heard me talk about it last year. So, around this time last year actually, I was talking about maybe making this middle long bed just for the pollinators and not really using it too much for planting. And it's funny because when I first started out with gardening, I always thought, oh, it's got to be productive, it's got to always be vegetables, I have to always be getting food out. And I just was not used to having a lot of flowers as well. And of course, the insects would get on flowers as things would bolt and there would be flowers on the vegetables. But I just in general did not have a lot of flowers in the beginning of my gardening journey. My dad was a vegetable gardener when I was growing up. My mom, she really didn't like to garden all that much, although she would do some beautiful mixed flower pots that she would put around the house. So, she was all about the flowers and small measure. And my dad was all about the vegetables. And I talk a lot about my dad's influence on me with gardening. And he certainly was the biggest influence when it came to becoming a vegetable gardener. But, you know, I think my mom was onto something. You know, those flowers were important for pollinators. And overall, your garden does so much better with the presence of insects of all kinds, even pests. And if you don't have pests and you don't allow for some of them, then the beneficial insects are going to come, check the place out and think, there's nothing to eat here. So, I'm going to keep going to the next garden. And then everything just gets out of whack. You get way too many pests or you get not enough pests. And then the beneficial insects have nothing to eat. Last year, I was looking at this garden and I thought, I want to get more flowers going in here. My inspiration for that was a book that I was reading. And I will share that in the description below. But this book was talking about hedgerows and about, and they called them insectaries, which were just big strips of flowers and blooming perennial plants and just things that were there not for production of food, but actually to support creatures, birds, insects, pollinators, beneficial insects, all of the things that make a garden healthy and productive. And I thought that is such a great idea. And I feel like that is something that is missing from my garden. So, as I was looking at these beds, I have four by four beds on one side of the garden. And then on this side, I've got three 30 foot strips. They are three feet wide. The first one is 30 feet. The next one is 32. And then the next one I think is 34. And so they are all roughly 30 feet long and then three feet wide. So I've got this one on this side and that one I was working on this weekend with my cattle panel. That's the end. And then I've got the middle one that's right behind me. That's got all the flowers in it. And then I have this one that I've got covered in burlap right now. So I thought, wouldn't it be great if I just set aside this middle strip for an insectary or for a pollinator strip? That way I could try to host more beneficial insects and more pollinators in the garden. And so I was looking through all of my seeds and I noticed that I had a ton of old flower packet seeds. And at this point, y'all are probably wondering if I ever buy a new packet of seeds. Although I think I have admitted pretty much that I have a problem with buying seeds. So it's not that I just keep old seeds around. It's that I just keep buying more seeds and I never end up using all of them. And then I save the packet because I don't want to get rid of it. And then I end up with older seeds too. So I was looking at these packets of seeds and I thought maybe what I'll do is I will make my own pollinator garden mix and just use up those seeds and plant this strip and just see how it goes. And that's exactly what I did. So what I did is I looked at the back of all of these packets and I found flowers that were for similar times. They had similar water needs, similar light needs, and I thought that they would share the bed well together. And I got a bowl out and I dumped all the packets right in and I mixed them all up and I prepped this bed and I sowed the seeds. And that was last fall. I'm sorry about the light by the way. It is a storm is kind of flirting with us. I don't know if it's actually going to storm or not but the sun keeps coming out and blinding me and throwing off the camera and then it goes in and then it gets really dark. So I'm going to try to talk fast. I'm hearing a little rumble of thunder but I think we'll be okay. Anyway, so I prepped the bed and I sowed the seeds and I just waited and nothing really happened until mid-February or so. So in mid-February I started seeing lots of little sprouts coming up and we get winter rains as well. I don't know if you all know that. We get a monsoon season between say June and September and that's our rainy season and then we also get a little bit of winter rain through January and February. Not a whole lot though. It's like monsoon season but we do get some winter rain and as soon as that winter rain came it was amazing just to see all these little baby green tender leaves starting to poke up through the soil. And so it's funny how seeds are though. Not all of them came up at once. They will just lay there in the soil dormant and wait until the conditions are right for them. So pretty soon I had bachelor's buttons, scabiosa, I had some darra, I had snapdragons and just lots of really beautiful things. Oh I think I had a little bit of orlea too and of course calendula and I had some linaria which is one of the very first bloomers in the spring. It really takes the cold well and it was just so beautiful. I always like to tease TJ and say this is where the fairies hang out you know when we're hiking in a forest that's particularly lush and beautiful or it's got a lot of ferns in it or if we go somewhere and there's a little flower garden I'll say this is where the fairies hang out. Well this was my little fairy garden and so it was really beautiful and then the spring blooms came and went and then the summer things started coming too. So before long the snapdragons actually had a bit of a revival which was fun to see and I had sunflowers coming up, I've had zinnias like crazy, cosmos, amaranth but I could not help myself. I did put a few tiny little vegetables in. On the ends of the beds I put two teepees, one on each end and they were of the scarlet runner bean and those are looking really pretty although there's something eating one of them and I'm not sure what it is. I thought maybe it was a bean beetle but I've been looking and looking and looking and I cannot figure out what it is. I don't see any droppings but I see the evidence of somebody snacking so I'm gonna have to check that out but I also put some okra in here and I put a few little zucchini like three plants and a couple of cucumbers but those are just kind of like in little pockets along the edges where some of the flowers didn't germinate as well so I thought well why not you know and then of course I tossed in a couple of watermelon seeds so those are snaking through here and it has just become the most vibrant most alive little strip. One of my favorite things now is to come out here in the morning and to just look at all of the different things that are on it. I've got longhorn bees on the cosmos, I have got butterflies, I've got bumblebees, the Sonoran bumblebee, I have honey bees, I have native bees, I have got butterflies and hummingbirds. It is just buzzing with activity all through the day but particularly the bookends of the day so in the morning and the evening it is just so lovely to come out here with my camera and to capture all of the activity and I have been seeing lots of other great signs too like assassin bugs. If you don't know what an assassin bug they are a generalist predator and so they will get bees as well as pests and I don't mind that because they truly get more pests than they get good beneficial insects but I've seen a lot of different really beneficial insects here. Lace wings are another good one. What else have I seen? Oh I've seen pirate bugs and those are really good. I have seen just spiders. I saw a really really cool spider just the other day and it was a green lynx spider and they get their name because they prowl about like a lynx cat and they're green. The mother spider will lay her eggs and then when they hatch she will guard her little clutch of babies just for a little while. I've gotten some really good pictures of that but they do a fair amount of pest control for me which is really nice so I feel like I'm rambling but my point in this video is if you just reserve a little bit of space in your garden you are going to be paid back tenfold. This is the fourth full season that I've had in this garden since building it. I've had aphids and I've had whiteflies and I've had other little pests here and there but for the most part the birds and the beneficial insects have helped balance it out. So they have a food source and they stay and I have had abundant vegetable harvest this year. Way more than any other year. It's been so great to see nature at work and doing a lot of the work for me. Even though in the beginning I thought if I was going to set aside this whole strip that's three by 30 feet roughly that I was going to be missing out on all of the productivity that the vegetables that I could have sown in there would have given me but in fact the rest of my garden has made up for that because I've had so much better pollination and so few pests this year. Well you may be thinking I don't have a 30 by 3 foot bed so that I can put in a pollinator strip and I hear that that is how I spent most of my time as a gardener too and I was thinking about that. How could a gardener gardening in a small city yard have a pollinator strip? Well you probably can't have one that is as big as this but you could make pollinator pockets and you could make little pots little flower pots that you reserve just for flowers and you could put those pots in groupings and you could then put them next to some of your garden beds if you have raised beds or you could put little patches in if you're gardening in the ground and even though you would be having a much smaller pollinator strip if your garden is smaller then it actually matches and it will work out really well I think and if you're having a problem with pests and you're just not getting very much out of your garden and you think why am I putting in all this work and not getting a lot of harvest then try that because it is going to be beautiful enjoyable to just sit and watch and it is going to make your garden much more fruitful so give it a try let me know what kind of a pollinator patch or strip or pocket you are going to plant and what plants you include in it I want to know because I am always up for learning new things new ideas new varieties and new techniques all right so I'm going to leave you with some video footage of this beautiful little pollinator strip just to give you an idea and to let you enjoy it too because when you've got something that you love you just want to share it and I want to share it with you I'm Kara from Sow Arizona thank you so much for watching until next time happy gardening