Flower Mixes for Pollinators: Diversity Beats Monoculture
Keith and Dale walk through their summer flower plots and explain why mixed plantings outperform single-species stands. You'll see what they planted, how it performed by mid-July, and learn how flower diversity feeds both pollinators above ground and soil microbes below.
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0:00 So at the end of our flower plot, of course we don't like to see anything grown in monoculture. We like mixes on everything, so we've got a couple of different mixes.
0:09 This low growing mix over here, Dale, with all the sweet alyssum and some little poppies and all stuff that stays pretty tight to the ground was just one that we commercially.
0:19 Purchased.
0:20 Again looking at it, could it be an understory type crop of some kind?
0:25 And so we're evaluating the different things in here but the one that excites.
0:28 Me the most is all of this. This is just a we call it the green cover flowering mix because it's a little bit of all of the different things that we had in the.
0:36 Plots some zinnias and some cosmos, and the four o'clocks, and again really good diversity and everything looking.
0:47 As good if not better here than it did in the individual strips. And when we talk about diversity, it sounds like, you know, we sound like a broken record when we talk about diversity.
0:57 Sounds like a broken record. So, you know, it's but it's true, it's true. It is, you know, you get everything mixed together and you get an extended period.
1:19 Ground each of these plants will have different root exudates that nourish microbes. Some of them will be high in protein, some of them will be high in vitamins.
1:29 Some of them be high in carbohydrates, and when you blend them all together, you get a more nutritious meal for soil microbes and you get different depth of roots you.
1:40 Get tap roots and fibrous roots. It just works better. Everything this is the way nature grows things. And even though the seed is relatively expensive, again it's pretty small seed and if.
1:54 You're going to do a flowering mix like this. You're probably not going to do it on a huge scale so it doesn't take a lot, or you can take a very small amount of this and you can spread it out across a larger area.
2:09 I will have nightmares now for a long time.
2:14 Dale, the flower child of the 60s, given even hippies a bad name.