The rudbeckia is just starting to bloom.
Pollinator Week has been a rainy week where I live in Minnesota. I was going to list all the pollinators coming to my yard, but it’s hard to see much activity when it rains hard every day! The rain doesn’t bother hummingbirds, and they are entertaining us at our hummingbird feeder.
Spiderwort, a native plant beauty!
The purpose of Pollinator Week is to heighten everyone’s awareness of how important pollinators are to us all. Our bees, butterflies and birds are having a hard time with loss of habitat and our overuse of chemicals. We use too many harmful chemicals to kill insects and fertilize our lawns and farm fields.
My message to you this pollinator week is reduce your dependence on harmful chemicals that kill pollinators. This includes butterflies and birds. Since 1970 North America has lost 3 billion birds. We can’t keep killing the insects and caterpillars the birds need to raise their young.
Birds and butterflies add so much to the quality of our lives Bees and other pollinators touch our lives every day in ways we may not realize. Imagine a world without most of the foods you love. Without bees we wouldn’t have the abundance of apples, pumpkins, strawberries, blueberries, or almonds that we enjoy. Pollinators even help milk production: the alfalfa and clover cows graze is replenished by seed pollinated by bees. A world without pollinators would not only leave us with fewer food choices, but would make it substantially harder to find the nutrition we need to survive.
Thoughts on creating a pollinator Garden:
- Provide a variety of flower colors and shapes to attract different pollinators.
- Whenever possible, choose native plants. Native plants will attract more native pollinators and can serve as larval host plants for some species of pollinators.
- If monarch butterflies live within your area, consider planting milkweed so their caterpillars have food.
- Plant in clumps, rather than single plants, to better attract pollinators
- Choose plants that flower at different times of the year to provide nectar and pollen sources throughout the growing season http://www.fws.gov/pollinators/
“Of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 19 are linked with cancer or carcinogenicity, 13 are linked with birth defects, 21 with reproductive effects, 26 with liver or kidney damage, 15 with neurotoxicity and 11 with disruption of the endocrine (hormonal) system. Of these same pesticides, 17 are detected in ground water, 23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources, 24 are toxic to fish and other organisms vital to our ecosystem, 11 are toxic to bees, and 16 are toxic to birds.”
Read more here: https://www.beyondpesticides.org/…/factsheets/30enviro.pdf
https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/protecting-monarch-butterflies-pesticides
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