Pollinator Wall

The Garden team stays busy year-round tending the land, working on seed saving projects and planning for the next planting season, but Winter is naturally a slower time around the rows. In late 2021, a couple of the Garden team members got together to brainstorm a Winter project, and they quickly decided they wanted to build a pollinator wall.

A pollinator wall is a space designed to offer a home to small bees and pollinators. It’s not built to attract honey bees or the bees that live in large colonies – there are only a few bees that make large colonies. It’s built to provide a habitat for individual bees and small pollinators that like to live in small cavities like sticks or under leaves – these are the insects that do the vast majority of our pollinating!

These insects are already here, but the wall provides a safe and enticing habitat to entice them to stay at the Garden and make an even larger impact with their pollinating!

Each opening is small, but the holes vary in size. Behind the tubes that are visible, the wall is packed with hand cut material to fill any large spaces, discouraging other bugs, like wasps, from coming inside and disrupting the habitat. The team harvested all native material for the inside, taking advantage of plants that naturally have a tube structure already – iron weed, coreopsis flower, sunflower stalks, corn stalks, river cane. The exterior is clad in cedar to preserve the structure through the seasons.

The team is going to fill the bed around the base of the wall with plants to finish the home they’ve created for our pollinating friends. The different species coexist happily together, and the team is excited to see them take advantage of a new home this year!