Managing Your Project: An Overview

Zooming Out: Managing Your Landscape as a Habitat

Especially in home gardens, management for pollinator habitat goes beyond just ensuring your plants survive and grow. A varied natural habitat with layers of native grasses, flowers, shrubs, and trees, well managed to include access to patches of exposed soil, deadwood, and leaf litter provides the kind of rich habitat pollinators require to meet their basic needs. Here are some additional practices we recommend to help pollinators flourish in your plantings. 

Leave the Leaves

In a typical yard, nature’s rich ground covering of leaf litter, home to scores of insect species that overwinter among the leaves, is blown away to expose a pristine lawn or a thick layer of bark mulch - both largely devoid of life. Standing dead or fallen trees, or the “snags” of broken limbs—all of which are crucial habitat and food resources for pollinators, birds, and decomposers—are removed as well. This results in a tidy-looking space, but one that’s unable to support pollinators or wildlife. It’s especially inhospitable to native bees, many of whom nest in dead wood or in bare soil; they can’t make homes in a garden blanketed with mulch. Make sure your space contains dead wood, whether fallen or standing (in safe locations); patches of bare ground; and especially undisturbed fallen leaves for pollinators to use throughout their life cycles.

The Basics of Management:

Watering is needed in gardens and hedgerows during the first growing season as plants become established. After that, it should only be required during extreme drought. Fall-seeded meadows need never be watered, as they receive winter and spring precipitation before their first growing season. 

Weed management is especially important in gardens and hedgerows for the first 3-5 years, as plants mature and fill the space. Well-designed native plantings leave little room for weed growth once plants are fully grown. In meadows, hand-weeding is impractical and weeds are kept down through annual mowing (see mowing section). If invasives spring up, more aggressive spot-treatment may be needed. 

Plant replacement is a natural and expected part of every project. In gardens and hedgerows, get to know your site conditions and notice which plants are flourishing or struggling at different times of the year. You may need to increase some species, replant others, and let others go. In meadows, small bare patches can be re-seeded or “overseeded” by hand during the winter months. 

Good management comes from paying attention. Observe your space carefully; note which species are doing well (or not) and get to know the microconditions of each portion of your site.You don’t need to micromanage your project, but you should keep an eye on it throughout the season - not just right after planting, but every year. In five or ten years, your garden or meadow is unlikely to look exactly as it did when you planted it, and that’s perfectly natural! The size, shape, and exact species composition of your plantings may shift from year to year, but by maintaining a diverse community of locally native plants, you will create a haven for pollinators and the webs of life that depend on them.

Goldfinch on winter stalk. Credit: Sari O'Neal / Alamy Stock Photo

Leave the leaves - mourning cloak. Credit: Panther Media GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Forget Fall Cleanup

Even some potentially richer habitats on our properties, such as flower beds and grassy fields left to grow long, are often cut down or mowed during “fall cleanup.” And most gardeners cut and remove stems and stalks from their flowerbeds too, in order to “put the garden to bed”. This cleanup comes at the worst possible time, preventing insects from overwintering under the cover of long grasses and inside standing stems, which many species rely on. Waiting to “clean up” the garden until spring, once insects have emerged from their winter slumber, can reap massive benefits for pollinators and entire food webs. Waiting until late April or even mid-May, roughly when apple trees have finished blooming, is the best bet to protect overwintering pollinators.

Dim the Lights

Light pollution from residential, commercial, and municipal sources is believed to be linked to the decline in populations of nighttime pollinators, such as moths. Less observed by people and less studied by science, moths are nevertheless incredibly important pollinators—a recent study showed that they may be even more effective than daytime pollinators such as bees. The transition to energy-efficient LED lighting, while climate-friendly, is actually detrimental to nighttime pollinators, as they are drawn to the bright, broad spectrum quality of LED light. Protect nighttime pollinators by turning off exterior lights whenever possible or using timers, reducing light pollution from indoors by closing shades, and swapping out bright full-spectrum lights with dim, warm-spectrum exterior bulbs. Look for “DarkSky” certified outdoor light fixtures that direct light downwards.

Moths circling light. Credit: Pavlo Romanchenko / Alamy Stock Photo

Skip No Mow May - Shrink your Lawn Instead!

A popular new movement, “No Mow May”, falsely promises that we can support pollinators by allowing our non-native grass to grow long. This break in the mowing cycle theoretically allows flowers to bloom in the lawn; however, lawn flowers are most likely to be non-native dandelions of little benefit to native insects, rather than the specific and diverse native wildflowers our threatened pollinators need to thrive. Pollinators also need food and habitat across the entire growing season, not just for a month in spring. Shrink your lawn area permanently by replacing part or all of it with locally native plants. Think about what part of your lawn you actively use and consider converting the remainder to native garden or meadow–you’ll support native pollinators, birds, and wildlife, and reduce carbon emissions too!