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One of my dearest friends has a daughter who has fallen in love with bats. She knows more about bats than I will ever remember and promptly forget. Pi (her nickname) started a blog to share her bat knowledge. A few weeks ago, she wrote about a group that encourages bat gardening. Y’all know what happened next…I started plotting out a bat garden. One for me, one for Pi.
The great thing about a bat garden is that most of plants were ones we were already planning to add to our garden. Bats will help control the mosquitos that take over all year-long in our zone 9a garden. They will also feed on the pesky bugs that like to destroy our veggies before we get a chance to eat them. Plus, the Wonder Kids love to hang out on summer nights waiting for the bats to swoop the yard.
Our seeds arrived pretty quickly after ordering. We were so excited to get growing. Marigold, coneflower, evening primrose, catchfly, black-eyed Susan, blood flower, phlox, and salvia were our choices to start the bat gardens. These are a small variety of night-scented and late-day blooming flowers recommended for a bat garden.
We have a wide variety of leftover plastic plant carriers. We cleaned and sanitized them for seed starting. It’s important to clean and sanitize them so any virus or bacteria that hung on after planting season doesn’t harm the new plants. The Wonder Kids had a great time playing in the water hose hosing them off.
We filled them up about 3/4 full. Each cell received a few seeds, depending on how many were in the pack.
With the seeds in, we carefully covered them with soil. Our trusty plastic fork garden markers help us to know which is which.
With the seeds in place, they received a nice gentle watering before being placed against our brick screen. They’ll hang out there behind an upcycled glass door insert as long as it takes to get them growing. It’s my version of winter sowing, since we haven’t had much cold winter yet. See how easy it is to grow a bat garden? Yes, you can grow that!
For more info about bats and their contributions to the garden, visit Organization for Bat Conservation. Also, bat houses are a helpful addition to a bat garden. You can build one or buy one.
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