Just Bee-cause

Did you know that 1 in 4 wild bee species in the U.S. is at risk for extinction?* Want to know what you can do to help? Plant flowers!

Aside from planting flowers in my garden because they’re pretty, planting them to help local pollinators is one of the main motivations I have to rip out as much grass in our yard as possible. I encourage you to do the same!

One time while I was out in my garden a neighbor was walking by and commented, “Your yard looks great! All we have is grass and I can’t even keep that looking nice.” I responded that the ironic thing about having a flowery pollinator garden is that it’s a lot easier to maintain than grass. It takes less water and if you don’t have time to weed the dandelions, no big deal – they add a nice dash of yellow to the colorful pallet!

Sidenote – if you want to have a really nice looking lawn, you probably have to use chemicals to keep the weeds out and spend a crap ton on water. Oh, and you’ve also created a wasteland for pollinators.

I am slowly but surely phasing out the grass in our front yard (much to the dismay of my husband ; ) and plan on making it a pollinator paradise. I can already picture having lounge chairs out on the flagstone patio surrounded by birds, butterflies and bees! But that vision is still a few years from being realized, so for now I simply delight in seeing happy bees in what’s left of our dandelion riddled, dry, crispy lawn and cramming as many flowers as I can into the planting areas so I can exercise my new hobby of taking picture of bees. They are just so cute!

If you are like me and want to learn more about bees, below are some awesome resources. Let me know if you have any that aren’t listed, I would love to check them out. I can’t get enough of this stuff!

Podcasts:

Living Homegrown: 147: Gardening to Save Our Native Bees

This was such a great podcast! It made me want to go out and take a class to learn more about our native bumblebees. It also taught me to leave stalks and stems on the ground over the winter since some bees use these as homes or to lay their eggs for next spring.