Creating a Habitat for Bees, Butterflies, and Birds

Creating a Habitat for Bees, Butterflies, and Birds Dave: Hi, I’m Dave Epstein welcome to Growing Wisdom. And welcome to Garden in the Woods, the Habitat Garden where we’ll be talking with Scott LaFleur about ways to bring some of these creatures like bees, butterflies and even birds to your garden. All right, Scott I see you’ve got this great penstemon. Scott: Correct. Dave: All right, good. I’m learning. And by the shape of the flowers I imagine this attracts some pretty neat things to it. Scott: Yes, the penstemon has really long tubule flowers. They’re really good for hummingbirds, and really good for bees. And the really important reason I’m putting this in this because it’s really important in the life cycle of the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly. Dave: Tell me about the different elements here. We’ve got some really neat things going on. Scott: Yes, what we’re trying to do here. This is the Habitat Garden, so we’re trying to provide a place for pollinators to come and find nectar and find pollen they can distribute to other plants. Dave: I like how you’ve brought water to the garden which is important. How did you do this? Scott: It’s very important in Habitat Garden to provide water. So we have to put it near water source to provide some bird bats, and we did a very natural looking bird bath here. We chiseled out the stem. We insert the copper into it, and now it’s a great bird bath, actually as ecological as could be. Dave: And we have homes for our folks here behind us. Scott: Absolutely, we have different types of homes we call it Habitat Boxes, and these are sort of built on the premise that you go out and spend the whole bunch of money in a really nice expensive bird house. And the bird goes to put these nests on the light next to the front door, so these habitat boxes are designed for anything that wants to move in. Simple boxes that have holes in them filled with wood, filled with stone. Birds make nests on them. Bees live in them. Anything that wants them they can use it as their house. Dave: So Scott garden in the woods is of course about plants and there were thousands we could talk about, but let’s hone in on the few that you would want to bring to our Habitat Garden. Scott: You would definitely want to bring in a really nice honeysuckle in this area. It’s great for the hummingbirds. It’s just the magnet for them. I sit on my desk I can watch them all day long. Another great plant would be the sylphium because it’s a cut plant, and the way their leaves come down together as dew forms and goes down the stem. The cup of the leaves actually catch it again provides the source of water for the insects. There are lupines that would be really great. They are super important in the life cycle of different butterflies. Asclepias which is super important in the life cycle of the Monarch butterflies so there’s a whole range of plants, and a whole bunch of reasons that they are here, the whole bunch of reasons that they provide things for the insects and the birds. Dave: Scott if folks want to know more about a Habitat Garden, where do they find that information? Scott: Newenglandwild.org, I want to say this is full of information on the plants for your habitat garden, where you plant them and how they’ll grow. Dave: Terrific, well thanks for helping us out. Scott: Thank you. Dave: And thanks for watching this edition of Growing Wisdom. Come back every week for all of our tips, hints and help.