Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Promoting environmentally sound gardening practices for over 35 years!
Bees are the superheroes of pollinators. One of the best places to learn about these amazing insects is Bees: An Identification and Native Plant Forage Guide by Heather Holm. It is a wonderful guide to the bees of the eastern half of the United States, the important pollinator services they provide, and the native plants they feed upon.
Wasps are important contributors to garden ecology – as pollinators, or incidental pollinators, of native plants, and as beneficial insects preying on other insects that damage crops and plants. Wasps: Their Biology, Diversity, and Role as Beneficial Insects and Pollinators of Native Plants (Wasps) by Heather Holm, provides a detailed look at these intriguing insects.
Answers to today's crossword puzzle and coloring pages wrap up our celebration of #PollinatorWeek. We hope the posts About Butterflies & Moths will inspire you to create more inviting habitats for lepidopterans and other pollinators. Happy Gardening!
As we wind down our celebration of #PollinatorWeek, we invite you to solve a Lepidopteran Crossword Puzzle. Good luck! Answers will post tonight.
We cannot approach the end of Pollinator Week without celebrating monarchs. Today’s post discusses their current status and recommends ways that you can help these iconic, but threatened, butterflies. #PollinatorWeek
Join Extension Master Gardener Elaine Mills to learn about the characteristics of pollinators and the plants native to the Mid-Atlantic region that will attract them and fill their needs, whether your garden space is large or limited to a patio or balcony. Best gardening practices for pollinators and special considerations for designing containers of native plants are also explained.
Today’s #PollinatorWeek post includes a list of nectar and host plants for fifty common Mid-Atlantic lepidopterans. Plants may vary from one lepidopteran to another although some attract multiple species and some feed both adults and caterpillars.
Today’s #PollinatorWeek post provides gardening tips, including those for patios/balconies, to attract butterflies and moths with the use and arrangement of nectar and host plants. Also, watch a video of a monarch caterpillar eating a milkweed leaf.
Continuing our #PollinatorWeek celebration, today’s post describes different tactics lepidopterans employ to survive and includes a new video of a gray hairstreak using his hindwing tails to imitate his antennae.
Answers to today's lepidopteran morphology fill-in-the-blank and word search puzzles. #PollinatorWeeK
Today’s post describes the form and structural features of lepidopterans. We invite you to test your knowledge with a fill-in-the-blank narrative and word search puzzle. The answers will post this evening. Good luck! #PollinatorWeek
The Pollinator Garden bed at Glencarlyn Library Garden was redesigned in 2019 as an intern project. The resources that were developed are posted for gardeners who would like to use them as inspiration for creating a similar bed in their own gardens.
Happy Pollinator Week! This year we are shining a spotlight on some of the most widely recognized insects in the world–butterflies and moths–with a series of posts, videos, and word puzzles throughout the week. Today’s post describes the Life Cycle of lepidopterans.
June is all about pollinators and how gardeners like you can help revive their declining populations. Three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and about 35% of the world’s food crops depend on pollinators to reproduce. 96% of North American land birds rely on butterfly and moth caterpillars to rear their youn
Interested in growing your own vegetables, but no yard? No problem. Vegetables can be grown successfully in containers any place with enough sun -- on balconies, patios, driveways, rooftops, front porches, or indoors with sufficient or supplemental light. There are many books about vegetable container gardening. Two of the more recent are Tiny Victory Gardens: Growing food without a yard by Acadia Tucker with Emily Castle and How to Grow Your Own Food—An Illustrated Beginner’s Guide to Container Gardening by Angela S. Judd.
Homeowners have an opportunity to restore native habitat for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife.
The Xerces Society emphasizes that we can help bumble bees thrive by providing three key types of habitat: plants offering pollen and nectar on which to forage, nesting sites, and places to overwinter. Extension Master Gardeners encourage the public to create, protect, restore, and enhance high quality bumble bee habitat. By implementing these practices and creating corridors between habitat, we can help slow, stop, and reverse the recent decline of bumble bee populations.
If you are looking for planting strategies with the potential to improve the productivity of your vegetable garden, or if you have heard about “companion planting” and want to know what science supports, Plant Partners by Jessica Walliser is a good resource.
Pollinator Week 2020
Without pollinators and other insects, life as we know it would cease to exist. Learn how pollinators are under threat.
The shape, color, structure and odor of a flower usually determine the type of pollinators it attracts. A flower requires a pollinator that will visit it regularly and successfully transfer pollen in and/or between it and other flowers of its species to ensure fruit and seed production. For the service of pollination, the flower provides a reward: usually food such as nectar and/or pollen. Thus plants and their pollinators enjoy a mutualistic relationship.
At a mere ¼-inch long, Hylaeus bees do not dominate a flower like fuzzy bumble bees three to six times their size. However, if you have sharp eyes or a zoom camera lens you can appreciate their unique appearance and BEE-havior.
Imagine being a pollinator drawn to a fragrant flower that offers abundant nectar . . . It's Pollinator Week!
Pollinator Week 2020: Happy Pollinator Week!
Join the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia in observing this week, June 22–28, 2020, by learning more about some of the insects, birds, bats and other small mammals that pollinate at least 80 percent of our flowering plants and about 33 percent of our food crops as well as what you can do to sustain pollinators.
Learn which plants will attract and fill the needs of our native pollinators even if your garden space is limited to a small yard, a patio, or a balcony. Best gardening practices for pollinators and special considerations for designing and maintaining successful containers of native plants will also be discussed.
