How to Attract Pollinators to Improve Your Garden Harvest

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Discover how to attract pollinators to improve harvest naturally! Bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects play a vital role in boosting fruit and vegetable production. Learn which flowers to plant, how to create a pollinator-friendly habitat, and organic methods to support a thriving ecosystem. With the right approach, you can enjoy bigger, healthier harvests while supporting your local pollinators.

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The foods that we grow rely on pollinators in order to set the fruits and vegetables on the plants for us to eat. For the past few years, our pollinators have been disappearing, and our gardens are hurting. I have many friends posting images of their plants dying off and flowers falling to the ground due to a lack of pollination.

While we have the ability to hand-pollinate our gardens, we also have the power to attract pollinators to our gardens and help them feel welcome and make homes in the habitats we can provide for them. You don’t need an unkept lawn to attract pollinators, though you can do some simple things in your garden to help pollinators thrive.

Let’s dive into how we can attract some daytime and nighttime pollinators to your garden so your garden is pollinated by both day and night shift workers in the garden.

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Image illustrates how to attract pollinators to improve harvest.

Bees: Attract These Daytime Pollinators to Improve Harvest

Image illustrates bees to attract pollinators to improve harvest.

Plant Flowers

You should plant a pollinator patch in a corner of your yard or on the sides of your vegetable garden. Plant perennial wildflowers in clumps with various bright colors in your pollinator patch. Allow the pollinator patch to grow thick for bees to work from flower to flower. They will stay in your pollinating patch all day, buzzing and working around your pollinator patch and vegetable garden, which will be easily pollinated since it sits near or in the middle of your pollinating patch.

Provide Housing

Invite the bees to stay longer in your garden by providing a comforting habitat for them. Place a bee house in the corner of your pollinating patch and watch them peacefully buzz around your garden, happy to have flowers and a bee house.

Provide Water

Bees need water when buzzing around and working all day, pollinating your garden for you. Give back by providing them with a water source to help them stay longer in your garden. If your garden does not provide what they need, they will leave and look around in someone else’s garden. Bees are attracted to bright colors. Help them find their water source by placing colorful marbles in shallow water dishes.

Butterflies: Attract These Daytime Pollinators to Improve Harvest

Image illustrates pollinators to attract pollinators to improve harvest.

Plant Flowers

Plant a ton of bright and tall wildflowers to attract butterflies. You can buy a butterfly wildflower seed kit to help you get started in growing the right flowers to attract butterflies.

Provide Housing

Hang a butterfly house in a tree or on a garden post in your garden near the tall butterfly wildflowers. They will bring beauty and delight to your garden as they linger around and pollinate your plants.

Provide Water

Butterflies need a shallow water supply for hydration. Keep a birdbath in your garden with marbles in it to help keep the water shallow. This will also attract the bees, so they all will need to share!

Hummingbirds: Attract These Daytime Pollinators to Improve Harvest

Image illustrates hummingbirds to attract pollinators to improve harvest.

Plant Flowers

Plant a ton of wildflowers for the hummingbirds to enjoy. Hummingbirds love brightly colored flowers, and you can be sure to have some hummingbird sightings in your garden if you plant a variety of colorful flowers. Also, provide hanging baskets of flowers from garden posts a little higher up for them to hover around!

Provide Housing

Hang up a few hummingbird houses in your trees to make them happy and linger around in your garden. They will help pollinate your garden, the more inviting your garden appears to them.

Provide Water

Hang a few red-stained glass water feeders for hummingbirds around your garden. Avoid clear feeders and added red food colorings, as they are not very healthy for them. Just buy a red-stained glass feeder and skip the red dyes. Your hummingbirds will be highly attracted to the red glass bottles of water!

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Fireflies: Attract These Nighttime Pollinators to Improve Harvest

Image illustrates fireflies to attract pollinators to improve harvest.

Plant Tall Grass

Planting beautiful, fluffy, tall grass varieties in the corner of your yard or vegetable garden will help attract fireflies to your yard. These nighttime pollinators love to pollinate gardens; however, they are not in every climate. I grew up watching and catching lightning bugs in my yard, and had fun chasing them as they floated around my yard! They would seem to disappear when they blinked their tiny lights off, and I would have to find them all over again.

Provide Housing

Fireflies love and thrive in humid climates thickened with pine trees. I grew up in the pine tree-covered hills of humid Ohio, so that is why we had them everywhere. I live in Northern Utah now, and it is a very dry climate. There are some parts of Utah that have fireflies, so not all hope is lost for me to help attract them to my yard. Planting pine trees in the corners of the yard and providing rotting logs and leaf piles underneath with a thick layer of pine needles, the fireflies will have a safe and happy habitat to thrive.

Provide Water

Fireflies thrive in a humid climate. If you do not have a naturally humid environment (like me), you can provide misting sticks in your garden. Turn the misters on in the evening to help bring moisture to your yard and plants, and watch the fireflies float around your yard and pollinate your garden.

Moths: Attract These Nighttime Pollinators to Improve Harvest

Image illustrates moths to attract pollinators to improve harvest.

Plant Night-Blooming Flowers

Moths are nighttime pollinators and are worth attracting to your garden. Start attracting moths to pollinate your garden by planting nighttime blooming flowers that thrive in the moonlight. When moths have blooms to feed on, they will visit your vegetable garden and help pollinate it when the daytime workers are sleeping.

Provide Housing

Hang insect houses in trees near your garden to help moths feel more inviting to stay around in your garden.

Provide Water

Moths are not heavy water drinkers. They get the water they need by feeding on rotted fruits and vegetables. Hang a fruit basket in a non-fruit tree to help hydrate it. Avoid adding too much fruit to the basket, as you want to avoid attracting flies and maggots. Again, NEVER hang rotten fruit near your fruit trees. That is an invitation for an infestation in your developing fruits on your trees.

Bats: Attract These Nighttime Pollinators to Improve Harvest

Plant Flowers

I know what you may be thinking. Why on earth would you want to attract bats to your garden, right? Well, bats have a bad reputation that they do not deserve. They are calm nighttime creatures that avoid human interactions and help pollinate your garden during the night by visiting your nighttime blooming flowers, fruits, and vegetable plants. Bats will not bother or hurt you and will keep themselves out of your sight unless you go out in your garden at night. You will get to see them flying around, but they will not bother you.

Provide Housing

Invite bats to stay in your garden by providing them with a bat house high up on a post. Just one bat house will provide shelter for multiple bats, as they love to sleep in groups. I grew up watching bats fly around my yard at night. They never bothered u,s and they were loads of fun to watch.

Provide Water

Bats love to skim over small bodies of water to feed on the floating insects on the surface of the water. Provide a water feature in your garden to attract bats. Your garden pond can be any size or shape. They are notorious skydivers with precision and accuracy in catching their food. If you are worried your pond will attract mosquitoes, put those worries aside because if you provide a nearby bat house and some nighttime blooming flowers, you can be sure your bats will keep the mosquito population down! We had lots of bats on your huge property in the country, and I do not remember being eaten alive by mosquitoes. They will help keep your yard and garden comfortable and pest-free.

Conclusion

When you invite pollinators into your garden, you’re doing more than boosting your harvest—you’re creating a healthier, more balanced space. Bees, butterflies, and other pollinators quietly do the work that makes gardens thrive, often without us even noticing. The more I’ve focused on supporting them, the more consistent and abundant my harvests have become.

Attracting pollinators doesn’t require fancy tools or perfect planning. A few thoughtful plant choices, less chemical use, and a little patience go a long way. When your garden supports pollinators, they return the favor—season after season—with stronger plants, better yields, and a garden that truly feels alive.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why are pollinators so important for garden harvests?

Pollinators help plants produce fruit and seeds. Without them, many crops grow poorly or fail altogether, leading to smaller harvests.

2. What are the best plants to attract pollinators?

Native flowers, herbs like basil and thyme, and flowering vegetables are some of the best options. A mix of plants that bloom at different times keeps pollinators coming all season.