In honor of Aquidneck Island Earth Week, Aquidneck Land Trust is hosting a pollinator habitat workshop at Spruce Acres Farm, a 22.67-acre former tree farm which is on the border of Middletown and Portsmouth. The workshop, which requires registration online but is free and open to the public, takes place on Sunday, April 21, 2024, at 9 a.m. Participants will learn about pollinator gardens and habitats, tips on ways to prepare gardens and lawns to help insects, as well as putting this new knowledge to practice in helping to prepare pollinator nesting sites at the Spruce Acres pollinator garden. All gardening experience levels are welcome, though gardeners should dress in appropriate attire and bring gloves and pruning shears, if possible.
The term “pollinator” automatically brings to mind flowers and bees. But this workshop takes a slightly different approach by expanding upon the idea of bees as the “poster child” of pollinators and flowers as their only necessity. “We’ll be focusing on the pollinator features of habitats and how you can prepare your garden in the spring in a way that’s beneficial for pollinators. And not just pollinators, but other types of beneficial insects as well,” Aquidneck Land Trust’s stewardship manager, Sean Grandy, explains.
Habitat is key. Flowers – especially native plants – provide food for pollinators, but there are “other features of the landscape that are really important for them in the sense that they need shelter, and they need a place to live, too, for nesting as well as overwintering,” says Grandy. For example, rock walls and rock piles provide homes for bumble bee nests; logs and their cavities create a small habitat for pollinators; many insects lay their nests in brush piles, and fireflies use them as daytime shelter; and moths and butterflies use leaf piles and leaf litter.
The workshop is especially relevant now, in April, as most shrubs and flowers are yet to bloom; before the attention-grabbing, eye-popping colors of spring make their full appearance, homeowners and gardeners will be more focused on winter clean-up regarding leaves, sticks, and errant rocks – all features that benefit some of the smallest members of the natural world. Learning to incorporate these features into gardens and yards is environmentally beneficial and can reduce the amount of maintenance required for traditional yard and garden upkeep.
Providing pollinator-friendly habitat is not so much as doing something as it is not doing things. Grandy references the leave the leaves campaign to emphasize this rule. Mulching leaves or raking them into big paper bags and then throwing them away essentially throws away pollinators and their larvae. The same is true for logs, rocks, and other unwanted or atypical garden features.
Through this workshop, the Aquidneck Land Trust is “redefining what a lawn means,” Grandy says. It is important to move away from “golf course” lawns with monoculture grass and towards ecological diversity and function by keeping and incorporating micro-habitats. Even “unwanted” aspects of a lawn are really useful for pollinators and beneficial insects; bare patches are used by ground nesting bees for their burrows, and clover is a naturalized species that helps bees and acts as a natural source of nitrogen for the lawn (so no need for fertilizers!).
All of these aspects can be seen at the Spruce Acres pollinator garden, “which is a good example of what people can do in their own backyards,” Grandy enthuses. Additionally, the native plants within the garden are labeled to give people ideas if they want to also work on planting in their yards or gardens for the spring. “Plants – especially native plants – are really great because they clean the soil, clean the water, sequester carbon,” Grandy expounds. Native plants, once established, are self-sustaining because they have evolved to live in this particular climate. Essentially, a native, hands-free approach is the easiest and most beneficial thing homeowners can do for their outdoor spaces.
Plants and insects have evolved together, and together they create the foundation of our ecosystem and our food web. Pollinators allow many plants to reproduce, including much of the food we consume. According to the USDA, “three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and 35 percent of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce. That’s one out of every three bites of food we eat.”
The event at Spruce Acres will also emphasize the importance of beneficial insects that live in these micro-habitats that are not pollinators. Predatory insects like wasps and some beetles eat pest insects like aphids and slugs, which further protect our agricultural systems as well as protecting a biodiverse food web. Another habitat gardeners can consider is a “beetle bank,” which registrants will be able to see in action at Spruce Acres. The beetle bank, popular at farms in the United Kingdom, is a raised mound in which native bunch grasses and wildflowers are planted, providing a home for predatory beetles and beneficial insects that eat garden pests.
“One of the great things about pollinator habitats is that they’re pretty easy to establish,” affirms Grandy, “and they’re micro habitats; you can have a little patch in your yard to incorporate some of these features – like one log, a little rock pile, or a few native plants like yarrow or milkweed – that can be pretty significant.” Low maintenance and small space all make incorporating pollinator-friendly areas easy. Plus, homeowners shouldn’t’ be ashamed about incorporating these practices in their yard for fear of being unconventional or judged; Grandy sees it as an educational opportunity, and hopefully a trendsetting one, too. But even if rock piles, logs, and leave the leaves campaign doesn’t take a whole neighborhood by storm, “even if it’s a small footprint, it can go a long way.”
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