May 24 Column: Pollinator Garden

You might recall that Bill and I created a pollinator garden last spring. What an adventure it has been! That’s the topic of this week’s garden column, which you can read in The Spokesman-Review: Pollinator project comes with lots of unexpected learning opportunities.

In it, I discuss how the plants are growing and the many things I’ve learned from it. Now that we’re into its second growing season, it has been a lot of fun watching the plants come back to life and trying to figure out what some of them are!

I’m hoping you’ll find the column interesting and fun to read, and I also hope it will inspire you to create your own pollinator garden. They can be as large or small as you want. Watching the diverse types of insects visit it has been a highlight for me and they would be an excellent educational tool for the kids in your family. (and if you go to the bottom of this post, you can watch a video about our pollinator garden)

For this week’s “Everyone Can Grow a Garden” video, I thought it would be helpful to talk about floating row cover and the many uses it has in the vegetable garden. We’ve been having a lot of rainy, windy weather over the past week so the garden is getting off to a rough start. The row covers are definitely earning their keep!

I also thought you might like to see a video from last August that showed how our pollinator garden was doing:

I can’t wait to see how it does this year!