The Mountain Lake PBS Pollination Station is back and blooming in its fourth 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.

With the summer season already packed with heavy rainstorms, many of the native plant species in the Pollination Station are thriving; growing tall and dense with each passing day. The early blooms of the Wild Blue Phlox and Golden Ragwort have faded and are giving way to the pink bursts of Swamp Milkweed buds where flowers will soon grow. These plants, as well as the Helen’s Flower, will soon be a towering four feet high!

Despite a slow start in the springtime, the Cardinal Flower and Clustered Mountain Mint are becoming hearty. Hopefully the Spotted Bee Balm, and Brown-Eyed Susans will too. We can’t wait to see the garden continue to burst with life and color. There’s already been a handful of pollinators dropping in, including flies and bees, and we’re looking forward to butterflies returning too.

However, as every gardener knows, big garden growth often comes with the arrival of other unwanted little critters. Despite your best efforts, both the bunnies and spittlebugs have descended! We’ll try adding more shiny, metallic pinwheels to keep the rabbits away. And while the sticky, frothy bubbles that the spittlebugs leave on the mint leaves look unattractive, they won’t cause much damage. A quick spray with soapy water should help keep them at bay.

As the summer marches on, we’re all abuzz as our buds blossom, awaiting more flying, hopping, and walking visitors who decide to pop by! Be sure to check back in for more updates on the Pollination Station with our Learn & Play blog and on social media.

In the meantime, 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! Don’t miss their annual Adirondack Pollinator Festival for free kids activities, grassland walks, conservation workshops, and to buy native plants for your own garden this summer.

Activities, Books & More

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