The Mountain Lake PBS Pollination Station is back and blooming in its fifth year on the lawn of 1 Sesame Street—our home base in Plattsburgh, NY.

Each year we tend our garden with love and care, proudly acting as pollinator advocates in our community. The Pollination Station’s four honeycomb shaped garden beds are jam-packed with pollinator-friendly plants, providing food in the summer and shelter during winter for butterflies, birds, and bees.

School is in and summer is out! With the days becoming shorter and leaf peeping season coming up fast, it’s the perfect time to look back on a summer’s worth of growth, challenges, and surprises at the Pollination Station. This year the native plant species in our garden saw huge swings in temperature and rainfall. June and July ushered in heatwaves and heavy rainstorms, giving our plants everything they needed to grow rapidly. After the first rush of early bloomers like Wild Blue Phlox and Golden Ragwort had come and gone, the next several weeks of dry weather proved difficult for many plants to endure.

A major lack of rainfall impacted many of the less drought-resistant plants including the delicate Cardinal Flower, Spotted Bee Balm and White Turtlehead – most of which blossomed briefly and then burnt up. The usually hearty Swamp Milkweed provided food and shelter for passing monarch butterflies through late July but faded more quickly than usual. Fortunately, each of these pollinator plant species attracted a variety of buggy visitors throughout the summer. We spotted butterflies, moths, bees, slugs, and flies all buzzing around the Pollination Station. Of course, some unwanted pests also came back: the dreaded aphid. While the type of aphid we’ve seen year-to-year don’t seem to be very destructive, they have attracted the invasive Harmonia axyridis (check out a photo below), otherwise known as the ladybird or harlequin beetle, who feast on them. Removing these pests is important to the health of our garden and the environment surrounding it.

Late August also showcased some of the most resilient plant species in our garden. As a surprise to us all, what we thought were potentially invasive plants turned out to be the absolute largest Helen’s Flower we’ve seen yet! This year we took a more intentional “lazy gardener” approach than ever before, allowing for mystery plants (like the yet-to-be-identified Goldenrod) to get established and start to blossom before quickly uprooting them. It’s a good thing we let them go undisturbed too. Not only did it give the now-towering Helen’s Flower the opportunity to grow into new areas of the garden, but the closely-packed Brown-Eyed Susans have come back stronger than ever. Each of these species now occupies areas of the garden where they hadn’t originally been planted. But that’s the great thing about gardening – nature always finds a way to keep you on your toes.

In these first days of autumn, dominated by the Brown Eyed Susan and Helen’s Flower, the Pollination Station is awash with stringy stalks topped by sweeping clouds of yellow flowers swaying in a strong breeze. Other lower lying plants still dot the garden plots in between, but they are quickly fading away. The Goldenrod which sprang up for the first time this year has begun to go limp and dry out. Both the Clustered Mountain Mint and Nodding Onion, found in several dense patches, have each begun to shed their seeds in preparation for the season ahead. One tiny, enthusiastic shoot of Great Blue Lobelia finally returned and clings on.

As the temperature drops and fall ramps up, we’re excited to see what last surprises our garden has in store. The future colder weather forecast means the Pollination Station will go from providing food for our local pollinators to shelter during the long winter months. Like last year, we plan to passively overwinter the garden, providing ground cover to animals and insects, and giving them the best chance at survival. This means that once the first frost occurs we can let the garden become a winter habitat. No need to clear out dead brush or lay on manure. We’ll allow plants to decay naturally, leaving them mostly uncut. Fast forward to the springtime, we will simply wait a little past the last frost before clearing out any dead branches and leaves so that overwintering pollinators nesting there have a chance to wake up naturally. 

But until then, let’s soak up the last bits of summer sun as it fades into autumn in the Adirondacks. We’ll be thinking of all the fun we had at the Pollination Station this year and hope you enjoyed our monthly updates too!

For a full season of Pollination Station updates, visit our Learn & Play blog and follow us on social media. Keep scrolling to learn more about what pollinator gardens are, how you can start your very own, and activities to encourage a passion for gardening and environmental stewardship in your family.

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What Is a Pollinator Garden?

A pollinator garden features flowers that provide nectar or pollen to a variety of pollinating insects, like bees, butterflies and moths. Native flowering plants – ones that come from the geographic area a garden is in – are best, and pesticides and other chemicals should be avoided when caring for them. In the Adirondacks this could include bee balm, milkweed, white turtlehead, mountain mint, and phlox. These gardens are beautiful and can help attract birds and other wildlife too!

Interested in starting your own pollinator garden but don’t know how? Sign up below to receive a free packet of wildflower seeds from the Adirondack Pollinator Project, courtesy of AdkAction.

The Adirondack Pollinator Project

The Adirondack Pollinator Project helps promote the health of pollinators in our ecosystem, provides resources to become a pollinator advocate, and helps communities plant more local wildflowers to help supply pollinators with the food sources they need to survive and thrive. AdkAction partners with The Wild Center, Northern New York Audubon, and Paul Smiths College to support ongoing activities of the Adirondack Pollinator Project.

As part of the project’s Pollinator Garden Assistance Program, AdkAction has used their Mobile Pollinator Garden Trailer to plant community-scale pollinator gardens around the Adirondacks—including the one at Mountain Lake PBS! Each summer, their annual Adirondack Pollinator Festival offers opportunities to buy native plants for your own garden and includes free kids activities, conservation workshops and more.

Activities, Books & More

For past updates on our Pollination Station, check out our other buzzworthy posts!