Designing Your Vegetable Garden with a Space for Perennials: Bring in Pollinators and Good Insects!

Designing Your Vegetable Garden with a Space for Perennials: 
Bring in Pollinators, Birds and Good Insects!

A vegetable garden is my place of serenity.  I enjoy working the land, planting, tending and watching my efforts grow into something I can eat and share. It is were I feel at home and find purpose. I am lucky enough to have found a way to mix it both into my life and around a full time job. For that I a grateful.

I have done a lot of videos hoping to help other gardeners find the rewards that I do in the garden. Another side to vegetable gardening is battling pests, disease and hoping your crops produce fruit and vegetables. One huge ally to pests and production are perennial flowers. They not only are beautiful, they attract a host of good insects, butterflies and even birds. I chose perennials because they will come back year after year. They are beautiful and save you money.

You want to have bees and pollinating insects hovering all through your vegetable garden. A great way to do that is to plant a perennial bed right in the middle of your vegetable garden. Let them fly over your garden vegetable plants as they are attracted to the flowers. They certainly land on your cucumber's flowers. This is a video of one of my beds. All the flowers in there are perennials I started in my grow closet.




Last year there was a point where a neighbor and I counted nearly 50 butterflies in the garden. This was unusual. Due to the temperature and rare circumstances a lot of butterflies in the Swallowtail family hatched. The flowers attracted many many of them to my yard. Some plants bring in sparrows that eat seeds, hummingbirds and other birds that will eat slugs and snails. Most of all they will bring in the beneficial insects that will eat those bad bugs like aphids. A web search will find lists of all kinds of beneficial insects from pollinators to bugs that eat bugs.  Here are some good bugs:

Bees
Minute pirate bug
Ladybugs
Big eyed-bug
Assassin bug
Damsel bug
Praying Mantis
Mealybug destroyer
Soldier beetle
Green lacewing
Syrphid fly
Tachinid fly
Predator wasps

Now there is really no specific flower that is better. I recommend planting many kinds in a small mounded space like in the above video or put them in containers or tuck them into corners of your raised beds. Or even better... do all three. If I had to recommend one perennial to include in your plants that would be the Purple Cone Flower. Butterflies love them. It is very easy to start perennials indoors.  One way, is just to make a plug of flowers. Plant it outdoors and let the strongest survive. This will allow the perennial best suited to your conditions prevail.



Popular posts from this blog

My Seed and Garden Shop: My First Shirt - A Garden Wants to Give!

Image
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel The Rusted Garden Over 800 Garden Videos Designed to Quickly Present Information! My Seed and Garden Shop: My First Shirt - A Garden Wants to Give! Some much can be found in the vegetable garden. I have written a blog post before about memories of my grandfather and how he taught me to grow a garden. I'll be doing a long format video series this year called Mental Health, Wellness and The Vegetable Garden which is really about how gardening can help you have a better quality of life. These are some ways a garden gives back to us. Last year I launched my Seed and Garden Shop. It is packed with all the things I use in my videos. This year I just added my first shirt with the phrase ' A Garden Wants to Give' . I chose the word Give over Grow for several reasons. Vegetables want to grow but a garden wants to give. It gives back in so many ways. It gave me a chance to connect with people (fellow gardeners) from all over the world. It gives me pea
Read more

How to Make Inexpensive Sterile Starting & Potting Mix: Peat, Vermiculite & Perlite - No Fungus Gnats

Image
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel The Rusted Garden Over 800 Garden Videos Designed to Quickly Present Information! How to Make Inexpensive Sterile Starting & Potting Mix: Peat, Vermiculite & Perlite - No Fungus Gnats If you don't use a lot of seed starting mix and you only pot up a few plants to grow as your vegetable transplants, you are better off buying prepackaged mixes. However, you need to sterilize it to decrease your chances of hatching fungus gnat eggs. If you use a lot of starting mix and use potting mix to grow your seeds starts to a larger size, making it yourself will save you a lot of money. It is very simple and you can adapt the mixes to your personal needs. A 2.2 cubic foot compressed bag of peat moss will cost you between $10 and $15. A 2 cubic foot bag of fine vermiculite will cost between $20 and $30. These are the two key ingredients for making starting mix. You will be able to make 60 - 90 quarts of mixes. I recommend not using perlite in the starting
Read more

Introducing Episode 1 of Gardening 101: Indoor Vegetable Seed Starting Basics: Seeds, Starting Supplies & Lighting

Image
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel The Rusted Garden Over 800 Garden Videos Designed to Quickly Present Information! Introducing Episode 1 of Gardening 101: Indoor Vegetable Seed Starting Basics: Seeds, Starting Supplies & Lighting I will be doing a long format video series with a digital table of contents so you can jump to the most relevant parts of the video. Gardening 101 will take you through my entire gardening season from beginning to end. On the way I will explain and show just about everything I am doing. It is a great way to learn and refresh your vegetable gardening skills. The first episode of Gardening 101 is all about indoor seed starting. I cover the seed types, starting supplies and really explain the kind of lighting you need. This episode will get you started in the really fun and relaxing world of starting seeds indoors. The video is best watched through my 2nd YT Channel My First Vegetable Garden as the video links will be active. Here is what you will find in the
Read more