Use Native Pollinator Plants in Your Yard and Patio

This spring we all are looking for activities to do at home in your own house or yard.  Pollinators are struggling with sharply declining numbers and they are vital to our food production. Here are some ways you can create activities at home and help attract and support native pollinators. You can provide food and nesting habitats by planting flowering plants in your landscape or in containers on your patio, and DON’T USE PESTICIDES. Try to use a variety of plants that bloom from early spring to late fall. You can start from seed a variety of herbs, native pollinator plants, and annuals beneficial to bees, butterflies, and birds.  Here are some herbs you can plant in pots: spearmint (but only in a pot because mint is invasive), oregano, sweet marjoram, basil, borage, lavender, and catnip/catmint.  Some native flowering plants you can include in your garden are: violets, prairie smoke, pasque flowers, purple prairie clover, pale purple coneflower, wild bergamot, butterfly milkweed, woodland and prairie sunflower, prairie blazing star, and great blue lobelia.
 
You can find natives at:
            
 Johnson’s Nursery Inc. https://www.kb.jniplants.com/tag/native/
Mileager’s Gardens www.milaegerslandscape.com
Monches’ Farm www.monchesfarm.com
Prairie Nursery  www.prairienursery.com
and seeds at:
Prairie Seed Source  www.prairiebob.com,  or 
Pheasants Forever www.pfhabitatstore.com/store/items/WI/
 
These sites can also help you choose plants that bloom at different times of the season. So please join the Whitefish Bay Garden Club in supporting pollinator insects and birds!
 
 
Written by Jill Griffee Ross, Co-President of the Whitefish Bay Garden Club.