• Wednesday 12 October 2022
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Have you ever wondered how to make your home garden pollinator friendly? Well, worry no more, we'll take you through how to attract pollinators and make your garden as friendly as possible to attract the insects that you need for your garden to thrive this season and beyond.

The Benefits of Pollinator Gardens

Insects and animals help and are a crucial part of the ecosystem of pollination, which helps to make food and flowers to thrive. For this, you need insects like bees and butterflies, but the loss of habitat elsewhere can make it difficult for them. They need areas where they can forage for pollen and nectar and have areas for nesting, without this, they can't help to pollinate the crops we rely on to eat.

Creating a garden that is pollinator friendly can be a simple task without much maintenance or upkeep, but in turn can have an incredibly positive outcome.

What plants attract most pollinators?

There are any number of pollinator garden plants that you can take advantage of to get your garden pollinator friendly and ready.

Evergreen plants like ivy and holly can help. With their natural look and their dense nature, they can provide a wonderful haven for bees.

More vibrant plants like hawthorn and lavender can also do wonders for the garden, attracting both bees and butterflies especially when in full bloom. Honeysuckle, allium, asters, crocus species including Ruby Giant, and crab apples are also great additions to any garden that wants to be pollinator friendly. Food is scarce for pollinators in the Spring time so spring bulbs are also important to ensure you can keep attraction levels high.

How to make a bee friendly garden

There are a few ways in which you can attract bees to your garden. For starters, limit the amount of chemicals that you are using. Non-natural chemicals will deter bees and other pollinator friendly animals from visiting and can harm them.

Long uncut grass can make your garden a great habitat for bumblebee nests and wildflowers such as dandelions, buttercups, and primrose. All of which are valuable sources of food for pollinating insects.

Pollinator Garden Ideas to Prepare for Spring

Keeping your garden a little bit on the wild side will help to attract bees as well. Even allowing a small section of the lawn to grow uncut will help not just bees but grayling, meadow brown, ringlet and small heath butterflies a source of food for their larvae, attracting them to your garden.

Other ideas that can help you to prepare is to make sure that you have loose mortar in your garden. This will create holes and small sections within the garden walls, naturally, you will want to make sure that they are structurally safe but doing so will allow species to nest.

Another great idea is to retain old fruit trees through the winter, such as apple and pear varieties that, similarly, to lose mortar, provide cracks and crevices inside the bark for bees. Like many of the plants mentioned earlier, old fruit trees also provide nectar and pollen-rich blossom.

Winter is also a wonderful time to not just look at what you can retain but also what you can grow in preparation. Planting bare-root trees and hedging can give you an incredible advantage when spring rolls around. Planting between November and March is ideal as the plants enter a dormant phase during this period, only to remerge as actively growing plants again in the spring.

Get your garden pollinator friendly today

Make sure that your garden is pollinator friendly today and for next spring with a range of products available at Bandon-Coop. Make your garden as friendly as possible and attract the insects that you need for your garden to thrive this season and beyond.

If you are interested in reading more about this topic or pledging your garden for pollinators, please check out the All Ireland Pollinator Plan website