How to 10X Your Vegetable Harvest

 

 How to Attract the Best Pollinators to Your Garden

 

We have a lot of fun planned we in this Article  are going to be doing a few different projects that I've been needing to get done but they're all wrapped around the same theme and that is attracting more pollinators to your garden stick around.I'm brain with California garden TV.

 

And if you're looking to join a garden community that offers tips tricks and support to help you grow your own organic fruits and vegetables and become a little more self-sufficient along the way.So I know at this time of year we're all you know in a frenzy trying to get seeds started maybe setting out starts that we've already got going on if it's warm enough where we are and a lot of times we don't really pay much thought to pollinators that actually help our plants produce fruit.

Because if it weren't for pollinators we'd have plants and no fruit actually we wouldn't even have plants because we need the fruit to get the seed to make the plant so we'd be in a mess now i'm not gonna get on my high horse again about the lack of pollinators and that there's less and less of them every year especially bees but there are i've noticed it and if you've noticed that too.

 Let me know down in the comments it used to be that one zucchini plant would keep you over stocked for the entire season and now it's like to get a good crop I've actually got a hand pollinate so there's definitely something going on so this year I'm making a specific point to leave spots in my vegetable garden to plant plants that attract pollinators mainly bees and butterflies now speaking of butterflies I'm gonna start off with the inspiration for this Article.

Yesterday morning I was walking through the garden and I happened to see something that I've never seen before in this garden and that happens to be a guy in here while they can't see but I'll get a close-up on him a monarch caterpillar I've seen other kinds of caterpillars in the garden but never a monarch now he just happens to be here because of the plant that's in here with him and that is milkweed now milkweed is basically the only plant that a monarch caterpillar will eat so if you want to attract them to your garden some milkweed milkweed is the only plant that monarch caterpillars eat so that makes it really great because if they come to your garden.

They're only gonna do one thing and that is pollinate not eat your veggies now this is a really cool project for kids so I'm gonna link one of these butterfly enclosures down below in case you want to try it out we've done it before and it's so fun to watch the entire change happen and if I can get it on camera I'll try to you know pass that along to you guys maybe over on Instagram so make sure you're following me there now within 2 or 3 hours of us putting him in here we didn't even need the milk milkweed in there because he's already hanging upside down preparing to become a chrysalis now there are a lot of different plants.

 

 That will attract all kinds of different butterflies to your garden milkweed though is super easy so if you have monarchs in your area milkweed it's it's so easy it it's a perennial zones 3 through 9 full Sun it barely needs any water except in the driest conditions no fertilizer it's simple the leaves and roots though are toxic to humans so just keep that in mind now bees are the real heroes of the garden well right up there with earthworms but they're neck and neck and there's a wide array of plants that you can use to attract bees to your garden.

Now there's one thing that pretty much puts them all in the same category and that is an open center showing a lot of the anthers covered in pollen now you can see that here with the cosmos the poppies the marigolds and even the distortions have little pollen filled throats now one of my favorite things to attract bees is basil and I grow green basil for me and I grow purple basil for the bees once it blooms it's incredible the amount of bees you're gonna see buzzing around it I always plant tons all over the garden it's probably my favorite herb other than cilantro I am way behind on pricking out and dividing these basil seedlings and I always show them like this because it would take so much room and space under the lights in the garage if I did each one in their separate container. 

How to 10X Your Vegetable Harvest

So I broadcast so them and then divide now if you've ever had a couple of seedlings come up in the same cell you either probably thin one out or try to divide them now when you try to divide them did you worry that you might kill one or both of them they're actually more resilient than you might think and there's a couple things you can do to make the transition easier I use a pencil to tease out the roots from one another and when I have them separated I take it by the leaf never the stem.

If you tear off a leaf the plant will grow a new one and continue if you break the stem it's all over you can transfer each one to its own container if it isn't time to plan outdoors yet or you can plant them directly into the garden if you remember to keep them moist one shrub that works really well for attracting bees.

They really love it and it's great because it's edible so it belongs in the vegetable garden is lavender I'm not going to go through how to grow lavender because I did a video on that a couple years ago in fact it's actually the first video on my channel that kind of really took off and went somewhere so if for nothing else then entertainment purposes I'll link it down below but today I'm gonna actually go out in the front yard and take cuttings of that lavender that I planted in that video so that I can propagate more and have them four back here in the vegetable garden so to propagate lavender from cuttings fill a pot with some really well draining potting mix you can add up to 50 percent perlite to increase drainage.

 

If you want to a lavender love drainage you want to pre moisten the potting mix and a terracotta pot works well because of its porousness but it's not required you don't want to choose growth with a bloom at the tip choose some fresh looking side growth and tear downward to get the heel the heel is where most of the roots will grow from remove the lower leaves.Because you want as few leaves on there as possible. Because you don't want the plant to be supporting leaves you want it to be focusing on root development once you have those leaves removed you can dip the lower tips in the rooting hormone. I'll leave a link down below to that if you need some.

And then you want to stick each of the cuttings right between the edge of the pot and the potting mix and that's really going to increase the drainage in the area around that little stem and so it's really gonna bring oxygen in there and not get too wet and be able to create roots as quickly as once you've got that done you're gonna put a plastic bag over the pot to increase the humidity and you're gonna put it in a warm shaded spot in four to six weeks you'll be able to cut one of the corners off of the bag to increase the ventilation and a few weeks after that you can remove the bag completely as root should be developing and at that point you can either plant each lavender into their own pot or put it right into the garden.

Honeybees were introduced to North America by early settlers from Europe and since that time they've become the most popular for sure in pollination and for honey making but did you know that before honeybees even arrived on the scene there were bees here already who did 100 percent of the bee pollination solitary bees like carpenter bees leaf cutter bees mason bees are three times better pollinators than honey bees honey bees are more interested in the nectar in the flower and they actually don't even care about the pollen whatsoever they'd avoid it. 

 

If they could solitary bees on the other hand actually look for the pollen that's what they want that's why they end up pollinating your vegetables even better than honey bees a really cool thing about solitary bees is they only venture about a hundred feet from their nest to do all their work so if we can attract them to our garden they could be taking care of the pollination here whether honey bees showed up or not and one way to do that is by installing one of these it's a little bee hotel pterri be hotel now you can make these or purchase them and basically what it is is a bunch of bamboo tubes all pushed into one section what they do is they take their eggs and they put them in these tubes and then seal the tube off bees are fascinating I love watching them work both in the garden and in the hives.

How to 10X Your Vegetable Harvest

And a couple of months from now we're gonna be taking a self-sufficient Sunday field trip to my best friend's house he's actually got an avocado orchard and he keeps bees in the orchard for pollination and so he's going to show us everything there is to see about his hives what the bees do and how they work so that's gonna be a fun one so make sure you're subscribed and have notifications turned on by hitting the bell now this self-sufficient Sunday we are going to be talking about being self-sufficient or more self-sufficient growing in containers that's when a lot of you have been asking for so definitely make sure to hate to see that one now if you're watching this on Friday the 17th tomorrow morning Saturday the 18th 10:00 a.m. Pacific time 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

 

It's gonna be our first live stream I'm really looking forward to it I'm really excited I'm gonna be answering the most frequently asked questions from all of my videos also gonna be taking your questions live so make sure you go over I'm gonna actually put up a thumbnail right now so you can set a reminder so you don't forget tomorrow 10:00 a.m. Pacific time.