Top Tips For a Pollinator Friendly Garden

Whether you’ve got acres of garden, substantial lawns or are a container gardener, there’s something we can all do to help the ever declining numbers of bees and other under pressure pollinators do their work.

You don’t have to have acres to play your part. You can plant pollinator-friendly containers, bulbs, trees or shrubs – all depending on the size of your garden.

Here are some top tips to help make your garden more pollination-friendly.

1. Plant Wildflowers

When choosing your pollinator patch, select wisely and do some preparations. If you want to sow a wildflower garden, you need to prep and sow it properly.

• Dig out a flat area and rake it off.
• Don’t add farmyard manure or anything to the soil, wild flowers don’t like or need extra feed.
• Scatter the seed as directed and rake it off again to provide a light dusting over the seeds. This will also stop birds feasting on them.
• Sprinkle with water-particularly if rain is not due within 48 hours.

Wildflower gardens thrive in sunny, flat terrain. But there are also shaded mixtures on the market as well as others that give you even more colour.

2. Avoid using pesticides where possible

Consider leaving the greenfly alone on roses or perhaps using one of the old-fashioned methods of removing green or whitefly such as dousing them in a little diluted washing up liquid

Use an organic slug and snail prevention option such as copper tape, reusuable traps and organic pellets. You can also hand pick the larvae from plants and deposit them elsewhere in the garden where they can do no damage.

3. Give pollinators a home

Wild Bees forage close to home and therefore need suitable nesting sites nearby. Give pollinators a safe place to live by buying or building your own bug hotel.

4. Provide water for pollinators

Transferring pollen is thirsty work!

Providing bees with a shallow dish filled with stones or marbles and a little water is a welcome and safe source of water for pollinators. Learn how to make a DIY Watering Station here.

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Through our Operation Pollination initiative we aim to encourage the Irish public to make their gardens pollinator-friendly environments and show a little love for our native Irish bees – a third of which are threatened with extinction. Follow us on social for more tips, hints and ideas from our horticulturists to help you play your part in saving the bees.

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