Allbirch Pollinator Garden

Overview

Lawns are now known to be environmentally bad (are they just an 'outdoor carpet'? Probably), huge weed/pest attractors, pollinator hostile and actually unnatural in central Canada (wrong climate here - its too dry).

# What is the alternative to mown lawns for our homesteads? Research shows that so-called 'Pollinator Gardens' are huge pollinator boosters, biodiverse, and perfectly natural around here.
# They are said to be the best way of managing our homestead landscapes, requiring no chemocides, just once-a-year mowing (before the growing season, to help mulch the new growth) and they are rain-watered.
# So, we are running a three year demonstration on our homestead to determine the best ways to create and maintain a Controlled Pollinator Garden landscape, starting in 2009, with the support of the Fletcher Wildlife Garden and others.

Controlled Pollinator Gardens are said to be the best by far homestead landscapes of all.

# Controlled Pollinator Garden have specially high biodiversity and wide variety of plants (there are scores of native and naturalized species in a Controlled Pollinator Garden) feeding more than just butterflies and their caterpillars.
# They are also important for the well-being of many others insects as well, notably pollinator bees, beetles, flies and more.
# Thirty percent of human farm food crops are pollinated by insects (bees and butterflies head the list), bats and hummingbirds - over a hundred kinds of mostly fruits and vegetables, the popular ones your mother always wants you to eat.
# Our industrial monocultural abgribusiness farm practices, combined with our urban street lighting and cosmetic chemocides, are extirpating our top pollinators (and hurting our kids as well).

Its time to move on to 'Controlled Pollinator Garden' homestead landscapes!

monarch butterfly, caterpillar and chrysalis
# We need to demonstration to learn how best to create and maintain Controlled Pollinator Gardens on our own homesteads.
# Constance Bay Village is perfectly situated for such demonstrationing with Controlled Pollinator Gardens because we are still really rural not urban or even suburban, but exurban - and we still are heavily treed.
# Our native red oak forest already provides habitat for some local pollinator butterflies (namely, the many Hairstreaks), their caterpillars and other insects, too.
# The The Allbirch Controlled Pollinator Garden Demonstration is underway, started in 2009!

Ottawa Green Map
updated 03/2012 by Leigh Doris