How To Help Pollinators with Kim Eierman

Episode #005 Today I am thrilled to have the author of a terrific book I read recently called “The Pollinator Victory Garden: Win the War on Pollinator Decline with Ecological  Gardening” by Kim Eierman.  In her practical and intelligent book, Kim will give you new ways of thinking and noticing and around your garden. 

  Kim Eierman  is an Environmental Horticulturist specializing in ecological landscapes and native plants. Based in New York, Kim teaches at the New York Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The Native Plant Center in NY, Rutgers Home Gardeners School.  Kim is an active speaker at Master Gardener groups, garden clubs, nature centers, Audubon Society chapters, AND beekeeping groups.  Kim also provides horticultural consulting to homeowners and commercial industry. 

Thank you Kim Eierman please tell us your story and why you wrote this book about nature and plants?

Several years ago, I made a major career change. I worked on Wall Street and had always been a nature lover. I switched careers to become a horiculturalist and “traded one kind of green for another. ” 

I am a naturalist and part of that is looking around at creatures that inhabit the earth with us and try to take better care of them. So pollinators are incredibly important to us and we tend not to we to pay attention to them. Pollinators, animal pollinators not just bees,   give us 80% of the reproduction of flowering plants on earth and a significant part of our food supply So we really should care so I wrote the Pollinator Victory Garden to empower, encourage, and inspire folks to help make change.

Please tell us about some of the research in your book.

There are many different kinds of Pollinators. So we think about pollinators as bees and maybe hummingbirds. But pollinators are also bees,  beetles, butterflies, flies, moths, and even some mosquitos are pollinators . This is important because we need to provide them with not just flowers but a place to live. That is the one thing I found missing from other books on the nature and gardens. So we need to start thinking about habitat 

The vast majority of our bees are native bees - not honey bees that were imported from Europe. The majority of native bees are ground nesters. They need bare patches of soil in a sunny location where the ground is workable – not too much clay, not too much sand. So keep that in mind. 

Our cavity nesting bees need cavities to rest in. They might go to pithy plant stems or hollow plant stems like Joe Pye Weed or Elderberries. They might go to old holes where beetles were burying. There are many places our native bees can go if we just start thinking about the habitat that we need to provide them with. 

So just providing flowers is a flower buffet  -- you need to provide habitat. Pollinators need a place to live, to rest, to hide and to be protected from the wind.  

Can we leave little piles of brush around for them?

Yes a natural landscape is a good thing. Some of us can do that, some of us it is a bit more challenging – depending where we live. Brush piles can provide a very good habitat. Leaving a dead log on the ground is also good because beetles leave holes for bees. Or we might leave a dead tree standing but we do have to be safety minded and might have to cut it back to a safe height so it does not hurt our kids, cars, house, etc. Thinking in a more naturalist way is not just good for pollinators but it is good for wildlife in general. 

 There are honey bees (that live in huge numbers in hives) and our native( solitary ) bees.

Kim what about native plants? 

Our native plants are an important part of this and so is evolution. There are now close to 4000 bee species in North America – con'd in show