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Celebrate pollinators this month, especially

Sacramento Digs Gardening
BY Kathy Morrison PUBLISHED JUN 5, 2020

With more than enough artichokes to eat, this community gardener let the rest go to flower. The result was a honeybee rave. (Photo: Kathy Morrison)

Support the hard-working creatures that make food and flowers possible

With so many vegetables and other plants flowering right now, it's no wonder that June has been designated National Pollinator Month by the National Wildlife Federation.

Pollinators are responsible for assisting more than 80 percent of the world's flowering plants to reproduce, according to the USDA Forest Service. They provide an estimated 1 in 3 bites of food we eat.

And while bees do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to pollination, they have help from many other creatures: Birds, butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles and even bats contribute.

Here are five ways to help pollinators in your garden and in your neighborhood:

1) Choose California native plants for the garden where possible. Native insects -- include the 1,600 types of native California bees -- need native plants to raise their young and thrive. The easy ones include California poppy, salvia, rudbeckia, yarrow and coneflowers. For more on bees, check out the Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis. And here's a great guide from the UCCE master gardeners on selecting plants for pollinators. Also check out the horticulture section of the California Native Plant Society website .

2) Let some of your herb and food plants go to flower. Designate a certain portion of the garden or even just one plant as a pollinator plant. Ever seen bees react to fluorescent purple artichoke flowers? It's party city!

3) Plant pollinator-friendly plants in clumps, which are more likely to entice them, especially hummingbirds. Hummers are drawn to long, tubular flowers in the warm spectrum: orange, yellow and especially red.

Monarch caterpillars happily devour leaves of a tropical milkweed plant.

(Photo courtesy Elizabeth Riley)

4) Love butterflies? Remember that they start as caterpillars, which eat leaves. You have to put up with some chewed leaves to get those gorgeous butterflies.

5) Most important: Avoid using broad-spectrum insecticides in the garden. Wiping out the good bugs along with one troublesome pest is bad for the environment and bad for us. Read any insecticide label before using it. Don't deploy the equivalent of a bulldozer when a trowel will do.

Bonus note: Here's a fun thing to share with young people in your life: A National Wildlife Federation kid-friendly webinar called "Pollinators All Around Us."

-- Kathy Morrison

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GENERAL GARDENING

An article about gardening.

Keywords:

UCCE master gardeners native gardens hummingbirds Sacramento gardening birds native plants bees California Native Plant Society pollinators butterflies perennials flowers

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Food in My Back Yard Series

May 6: Maintain soil moisture with mulch for garden success

April 29: What's (already) wrong with my tomato plants?

April 22: Should you stock up on fertilizer? (Yes!)

April 15: Grow culinary herbs in containers

April 8: When to plant summer vegetables

April 1: Don't be fooled by these garden myths

March 25: Fertilizer tips: How to 'feed' your vegetables for healthy growth

March 18: Time to give vegetable seedlings some more space

March 11: Ways to win the fight against weeds

March 4: Potatoes from the garden

Feb. 25: Plant a fruit tree now -- for later

Feb. 18: How to squeeze more food into less space

Feb. 11: When to plant? Consider staggering your transplants

Feb. 4: Starting in seed starting

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Garden Checklist for week of May 11

Make the most of the lower temperatures early in the week. We’ll be back in the 80s by Thursday.

* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. Time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.

* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.

* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions.

* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters. (You also can transplant seedlings for many of the same flowers.)

* Plant dahlia tubers.

* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.

* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.

* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.

* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.

* Add mulch to the garden to maintain moisture. Mulch also cuts down on weeds. But don’t let it mound around the stems or trunks of trees or shrubs. Leave about a 6-inch-to-1-foot circle to avoid crown rot or other problems.

* Remember to weed! Pull those nasties before they set seed.

* Water early in the day and keep seedlings evenly moist.

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