FIMBY: Help pollinators help your garden

Happy Pollinator Week! Celebrate by doing something nice for bees, birds, butterflies and other plant helpers.

If you want to grow food, you need pollinators. Making your edible garden more attractive to pollinators will help make that garden automatically more productive.

Created with the unanimous approval of the U.S. Senate in 2008, National Pollinator Week raises awareness of the importance of pollinators to our food supply – and planetary health. This 18th annual commemoration, officially June 16-22, focuses on what individual home gardeners can do to keep bees buzzing, butterflies flitting and hummingbirds zipping from one flower to the next.

Those aren’t the only pollinators that are busy in our gardens, farms and wildlands.

“Birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small mammals that pollinate plants are responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food,” say the organizers. “They also sustain our ecosystems and produce our natural resources by helping plants reproduce. Without the actions of pollinators, agricultural economies, our food supply, and surrounding landscapes would collapse.”

Pollinator Week’s official website – https://www.pollinator.org/ – boasts a wealth of information on pollinators including who does what with which flowers and crops. It also includes some surprising facts such as the importance of flies, beetles, moths and other insects in pollination. (Bees, butterflies and hummers aren’t the only ones feeding off flowers.)

Here’s a sampling of that advice:

* Any outdoor space can become pollinator habitat – even a window box or a curbside median strip. Some spaces are more suited than others; flowers tend to need at least partial sun. Select a site that’s protected from strong wind with available water.

* Not only plants require water; the pollinators need a drink, too. Incorporate water features (such as a small fountain) or shallow water dishes in your garden to help thirsty bees and birds. Some butterflies appreciate a little mud. Some native bee species require a little bare ground for their nests.

* Native plants do the best job of feeding native insects, say the pollinator experts; those California flowers are what are native pollinators naturally crave.

* When planting for pollinators, group multiples of pollinator-friendly plants together; that forms a larger target that’s easier for them to find. It also makes pollinating more efficient.

“If a pollinator can visit the same type of flower over and over, it doesn’t have to relearn how to enter the flower and can transfer pollen to the same species, instead of squandering the pollen on unreceptive flowers,” say the experts.

* Pollinators need food over weeks and months, so use different plants that will extend your garden’s bloom season from early spring to late fall.

* Different plants attract different pollinators. Plant a diversity of plants to support a variety of pollinators. Choose plants with different bloom colors, fragrance and season of bloom as well as different heights – some pollinators like tall plants while others will go after groundcovers.

* Pollinators tend to gravitate towards certain colors and shapes. Bees love bright white, yellow and blue. Butterflies like bright colors, too, but favor red and purple; they need a flower that forms a landing platform (butterflies don’t hover). Hummingbirds see red – scarlet in particular – as well as orange and bright white. Hummers prefer tubular blooms.

* To help gardeners pick the right plants for their potential pollinators, Pollinator.org offers detailed gardening guides and garden recipe cards with specific plant suggestions. These wonderful resources are available for free download.

Sacramento and the upper Central Valley is part of the 24-page garden guide for the “California Dry Steppe Province,” one of scores of agricultural regions nationwide. Here’s the link: https://pollinator.org/PDFs/Guides/Calif.Dry.Steppe.May.2024.rx6.pdf