Making sure an entire garden is pollinated so that you're getting fruits and
vegetables coming out of your garden like crazy,
can be a full-time job unless you employ the use of pollinators.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's our goal to help you grow a greener thumb.
This is one of the best ways to do it - planting pollinator attracting plants in
your garden. So we're going to go over 11 of them in today's video,
but first a word from ProFlowers.
Who sponsored this video.
ProFlowers sent out these two incredible birthday bouquets that I picked out.
And I figured I'll play the role of the local florist,
who would normally deliver these to you,
and deliver them to Epic Gardening subscribers.
We're up here at the first Epic Gardening subscriber's house.
We have the Hello Sunshine, bouquet.
I'm going to pop out and give them a little.
Birthday surprise. This first subscriber,
it took a little bit to get to the house,
and then once we got there we hung out and talked about plans for her backyard
garden.
We're at subscriber number two's house with the Fiesta bouquet.
I believe her birthday's in a couple of days but we're going to surprise her a
little early.
When I met this woman to deliver her flowers,
I discovered she is setting up a huge permaculture property in Mexico,
which was totally epic. Now I played the local florist in these deliveries,
but if you use the code EPIC in the description,
a local florist will deliver these beautiful bouquets right to your door.
Now that I'm done playing flower deliveryman, we're back in the pollinator bed.
And let's first talk about baseline understanding of why certain types of
pollinators will come in to certain types of flowers.
So what you see here is a pretty wide variety of different types of flowers,
both in their shape and structure, in their color,
in their size and in the sheer amount of them. So, you know, over here,
which I'll talk about in a second,
this one kind of looks almost like a little landing pad.
So we'll talk about why that's important.
Over here we have a very big sort of coneflower echinacea-style plant.
And then over here, this big honker right here,
this delphinium will attract something different.
So the shape and color really matter. For something like this,
or maybe even this guy right here,
these tubular flowers are going to attract a pollinator who has the biology
to interact with that. So for example,
the beak of a hummingbird is going to have an easier time getting in to a
tubular style flower.
Whereas maybe a big bumblebee is going to come over here and park itself over
here or something like a hoverfly will land on this alyssum down here.
So let's now break each flower down.
I'll tell you exactly what they're good for and why you should plant them in the
garden. We're getting down and dirty.
I really want to get close to these and admire them, but also talk about them.
So right here, this is a pickup that you can find in almost any nursery,
it's lobelia. It's blue lobelia. This is your bee attractor.
So all different types of bees actually - sweat bees, carpenter bees,
normal honeybees - they'll all flock to this.
It'll attract some pests, not too too many, which is really nice.
But the nice thing about this is it'll get to about three-ish feet tall if you
let it. You don't have to get it to that point, you can cut it back.
But I like it sort of to mound around some of these larger ones,
which we'll talk about next. So the second one you often hear is a medicinal,
but it's also a great attractant. This is an echinacea,
also known as coneflower. These ones I find to be really beautiful,
this sort of pale yellow color.
But this is going to attract pretty much everything across the board.
So butterflies, hummingbirds, bees, anything like that.
Pretty much no matter where you live, echinacea is going to work for you.
Cause it's hardy down to zone four. It's pretty drought tolerant.
It can handle a wide range of soil types. You can find it pretty much anywhere.
And it blooms for quite a bit of the year.
It's going to start in the summertime. It's going to go through autumn.
If you're in a warm climate,
it'll persist into maybe even the beginnings of winter.
And if you want to keep it going forever, you can just deadhead it,
which is as soon a head is spent, a flowerbud is spent,
you can clip it off low and you'll promote more growth.
This one here is for sure the best smelling of the bunch. This is heliotrope,
it's named Fragrant Delight, this variety at least. You give it a smell.
It smells like cherry vanilla blossom or something like that.
Almost like warm milk with like some sort of syrup in it.
It's one of the best smelling things you will ever smell, I promise you that.
Not only that, it is a great pollinator attractant.
Check out the structure of the plant.
It's way different than some of the other flowers because you have tons of tiny
little flowers that almost form like these purplish clouds that things can land
on. So what you'll find is, you know,
monarchs will come hang out on this or other types of butterflies.
You'll find little hoverflies floating around it.
It's a really great sort of landing pad and tons of tiny little flowers that
these smaller insects can get in and take that nectar. This one here,
you probably recognize, this is milkweed.
There's actually a lot of different types of milkweed.
This is narrow leaf milkweed. So in my area,
this is the one that all of our monarch butterflies are going to feed on.
So this probably won't even be here in a little bit because the monarchs are
going to absolutely devour it. The thing I'll say about milkweed is,
it is the plant that monarchs feed on. So if you do want to attract them,
this is THE number one plant that you can add.
But a lot of nurseries will sell what's called tropical milkweed and it is not
the best one to buy. In my area, narrow leaf milkweed is the native one,
which stands to reason that's the one that the monarchs are going to like.
The reason why it's bad, for example,
to have a tropical one is this'll get eaten up and it won't be here by the time
that winter comes around.
Whereas tropical milkweed will come back and the monarchs will continue to feed
on it and it disrupts their migratory pattern.
So they're going from Mexico up to Canada, over five generations.
And so if you disrupt it,
you might throw a generation off and you kind of aren't helping the monarchs
out. But if you do want monarchs in your garden, milkweed is the one for you.
So this little guy right here is called alyssum,
it's become a staple in my garden. And the reason why, first of all,
it smells like honey. It has a beautiful, beautiful smell to it,
but it's going to be mounding and sort of pulling in all these smaller things.
You'll notice a lot of hoverflies will come in.
You'll notice these smaller wasps, these predatory wasps. And it spreads.
So eventually this is going to kind of clump around and fill in a lot of these
gaps around my bigger pollinators. This beautiful one here is called agastache.
It's striking,
you get these very long tubular flowers and these very interesting sort of
flower sheaths. I don't know the botanical term for it. But as you can imagine,
this is great for butterflies because the proboscis can get in there and then
hummingbirds, because again,
the beak can get in there and the tongue can get in.
And so it's a fantastic one for those two specifically. If you're in a hot zone,
this is a great choice because it's heat and drought tolerant.
It doesn't want a lot of water. So, you know, if I'm planting it crammed in,
like I kind of am in the rest of this pollinator garden,
I'm going to want to make sure that this area at least,
I monitor how much I'm watering. Because it really doesn't like it.
And then as far as smell goes,
it sort of has like a lemony anise type of smell. So you could use it in tea.
I've never done it, but certainly a secondary benefit. This little guy here,
which will not stay little for long, is called yarrow or achillea.
Yarrow is a huge sort of variety. You can get all sorts of different colors.
But basically the same idea here,
these large sort of umbral style structure to the flower,
kind of like we looked at a little bit earlier.
So all sorts of different things are going to find a home on this.
And they're very, very beautiful and very low maintenance.
If you are a plant killer, this is the one for you. This little guy here,
as you can probably guess, is a daisy. It's a Dahlberg daisy.
So you'll find this natively in like a rocky creekbed type of situation.
So as you can imagine, really good drainage,
decent sun exposure up to full sun and it'll self seed.
So this is a thing that'll keep coming back, no matter what you do.
So you gotta be careful about it.
I wouldn't say this is the most pollinator attractant plant out of anything in
this bed here, but it still has some benefit.
You'll see some bees and that sort of thing.
So if you do like a daisy that's a lower grower, this is your choice.
So this here is pentas. This is a really beautiful sort of blood red,
maroon type of color. Then again, I'm partially colorblind.
So why don't you tell me what color you think it is?
Cause I run into trouble all the time. But this one is an annual,
it is a quick grower.
So if you want something that will die back and you can sort of replant
something different there, that could be a choice for you.
It's kind of an all around pollinator with butterflies, bees, birds.
So it'll bring in most anything that you want to bring in.
And it can tolerate some heat. So if you're in a higher zone,
it can be a good choice. But it's going to want moisture conditions overall,
which is kind of why I talked about,
if you're planting a bunch of mixed pollinator attractants in the same bed,
you may want to be careful where you're watering. Here
we have one of the most versatile plants for the garden in general,
specifically for pollinators, especially if you want hummingbirds in the garden.
Salvia is one of the best ones, again with the tubular flower.
So this one's called So Cool Pale Blue, interesting name. It's a beautiful,
beautiful salvia. This one - pretty easy to care for. It's a full sun plant,
medium water. It can perennialize if you're in a warmer zone, if not,
it can die back and come back. So it would still be a perennial at that point,
but you can also just keep starting them from seeds year after year.
So this big boy here is delphinium. We had to save the best for last.
It is really, really large. This flower spike is massive.
It's bigger than my head, which is a hard feat to accomplish.
So this is probably the most finicky one in the garden.
It's going to want cooler conditions.
It's going to actually want a little bit of shade. So in this particular area,
I'm kind of just crossing my fingers and hoping it does well,
but it was too pretty to not try out. So if you're in a cold zone,
this actually could be a great choice for you because it can be hardy down all
the way to zone three.
Which is a rare thing to say that a plant's hardy down to zone three.
It also is going to be somewhat finicky as far as when this blooms.
It's going to have one big spike like this in the summer, it's summer right now.
And once this dies back,
you can cut it back and you'll get these secondary shoots,
which still look good. But I mean, nothing is as good as this big boy. Again,
you're probably going to see a variety of different pollinators on this from
some, maybe even some of the bigger bees,
like a bumblebee or something like that, all the way down to the smaller guys,
the wasps and the hoverflies and such.
So we will see how this pollinator garden does over the course of the summer.
I got a little aggressive by planting it quite densely,
but I just wanted to see how these all interplay.
So if you follow me over on Instagram,
you'll probably end up seeing some little clips of pollinators coming in and
actually getting some action over here. And then of course,
making their way into the edible garden, which is amazing.
So hopefully you learned a lot in this video. And again,
thanks to ProFlowers for sponsoring this video.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.