Pollinator Plants for the Mountain West

Header image: Lupinus albus (altramuces o chochitos), by Calapito via Wikimedia Commons.

Not everyone has a backyard appropriate for a large garden, but almost everyone can keep a container plant. Size is only one of the many advantages of growing plants in containers rather than in the ground. This only works well, however, if you select plants that are happy living in a pot. Gardeners in the West have many choices. Read on for some top options for California or Nevada container gardening.

‘Potato Pete’ was a cartoon character from the WW2 era, whose job was to persuade people to fill up on homegrown potatoes rather than bread made from imported wheat. Potatoes made it into all kinds of recipes during the war, replacing some of the fat in pastry and even turning into dessert. The Ministry of Food published the Potato Pete Recipe Book, which you can read online.

This summer, we will be focusing on the main garden. The aim is to have the structure in place by the end of the year, so I can spending next year gardening rather than building the garden. It’s not that it hasn’t been an interesting experience, and I’m loving watching the design unfold and become the garden we want, but I’ve spent far more of the year wanting to garden than I will spend actually gardening!

How does a kitchen gardener choose what to grow? It’s about balancing quite a complex set of variables, which include the space and time available, the local climate and soil, the gardener’s skill level and what they like to eat. That last one is, itself, quite a complicated topic as culture plays a significant role. There are many thousands of edible plants on the planet; most people only eat a small number and grow fewer still.

It’s time to shake the mud of 2016 off our boots, and to prepare the soil for 2017 (metaphorically speaking). I have the bones of a planting plan for next year, which will be subject to revisions, and we know which areas of the garden still need work.

Allyson Brady, McMaster University

Last summer, Ryan and I popped on our face masks, slathered our hands in sanitiser and braved a trip to pandemic-era Ikea. There were a few things we needed, and I wanted to stock up on consumables for my Hydroponicum.

Header image: The Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a flyby of the Moon. NASA

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There is no perfect garden plant, unless one is talking about plastic. All chlorophyll-loaded garden accents have both good and bad visual and cultural attributes. Understanding the weaknesses of your garden’s plant material presents an opportunity for you to use one plant to complement another while hiding visual weak points.

As Digital Content Editor Christine Alexander explains, pollinators play a vital role in our ecosystem and we should all be doing our part to support their populations: