Living at the Pollinator Wall

In 2022, we introduced a new addition to the Garden that is as eye catching as it is functional – the pollinator wall.

Pollinator walls are designed to create a safe home for small pollinators and attract them to the area. It’s these individual pollinators that do the majority of the pollinating in our garden at Blackberry Farm.

Part of attracting pollinators to the pollinator wall is ensuring that there are plants growing near and around it that will draw them in. We grow a lot of different flowers around the pollinator wall to attract beneficial insects. Some of these are native flowers, like columbines, although not all of them are. The Garden team plants a variety of flowers with different bloom times to keep the area appealing to the pollinators for as long of a season as possible.

The pollinator wall is made up of different sticks, stems and plant material, with various sizes and hardness, to benefit multiple species of wild pollinators. When the wall was being constructed, the team harvested native materials that naturally had a tube structure – like iron weed, sunflower stalks, river cane, corn stalks and coreopsis flower – to create the different sized holes the insects can make a home in. The pollinators you can discover at the Garden include bees, wasps, butterflies, moths and beetles, just to name a few.

All of the crops in the Garden benefit from wild pollinators in some way. Many of the pollinators, such as wasps, eat common garden pests that would otherwise do damage to the crops we’re growing. Most of the plants also benefit from the pollinating itself. Crops like tomatoes and peppers produce more fruit with the help of pollinators, while some crops, like pumpkins and apples, rely on them to grow.

We’re loving watching the wall fill with inhabitants, and we hope they’ll be buzzing about for a long growing season!