Joe Wycked 🌻🚗⛰️ on Nostr: Garden update...I'm trying to avoid the classic error of having all flowering plants ...

Garden update...I'm trying to avoid the classic error of having all flowering plants peter out by mid to late summer. What are pollinators supposed to eat then?

🌻 For the first time, goldenrod is everywhere, tall plants now at over 6 feet/2 meters. There are four separate patches, all of which experience sunlight at different times of the day. The resulting early and late flowering extends pollinator foodstuffs through October. Pic 1 is trying to show fading flowers in front with robust flowers in the background, but I'm not that good.

🪲In my area, goldenrod is food for many species, especially the oft-forgotten moths. But Goldenrod is also essentially its own habitat, housing leaf beetles, leaf-mining flies, gall midges and gall flies, plant bugs and stinkbugs. All of these can be food for birds, to help reduce their own declining populations.

📈 This amount of goldenrod is far more than last year. Today I saw bumble bees, carpenter bees and northern paper wasps without even looking hard. The bees will be active as long as I have flowers for them, possibly through November.

🛌 What were my sophisticated efforts to establish these goldenrod patches? I merely stopped removing the young plants. They reseed themselves. (If my neighbors ask, tell them it took a lot of work.)

#WildflowerWednesday #HabitatGardening #Gardening #Bloomscrolling #Pollinators #Goldenrod