(light upbeat music) >>Pollinators are responsible for about one in three bites of food that we eat every day.

Pollinators need flowers to survive for their food and to thrive.

While I do love a good flower garden, vegetables have really great and really beautiful flowers as well.

We have here some Cherokee moon and stars watermelon, some squash and some corn.

And this is busy with activity from native bees and from bees from my beehive.

Corn on the other hand is wind pollinated.

A lot of gardeners get frustrated because they want to grow more than one kind of corn, or they don't want to have cross-contamination from neighbors fields.

One thing that you can do, I have corn here.

This is Monacan Tutelo corn, and then I've got Quapaw Red over there, is we separate by time.

The silks, which represent one kernel each down here on the cob only take up about 10 to 14 days of pollen from these tassels.

So if you stagger your corn plantings by about three weeks, generally you should be really safe.

So every three weeks throughout the season, I will plant another like day to harvest variety of corn.

These are kind of let go.

They're gonna do what they're doing.

I don't plant any other watermelons, but the squash we do save seed from.

So one of the things that you can do to prevent cross pollination, because different types of squash, even if it's a winter and a summer squash can in some cases cross pollinate and the bees, while they're doing their job, might do something you don't want them to do.

You're gonna take a look down here.

You can see that we've got one beautiful squash that's going to seed here.

This is a Penobscot pumpkin, and you've got male flowers, which are generally these leggier ones here that are farther away from the central vine.

And then you've got female flowers that are gonna be closer to the vine.

They're gonna have little embryonic squashes of the base that need to be pollinated in order to continue to develop.

And if you don't want your bees to cross pollinate those squash for you, you can just simply take a male flower.

You can open that up.

You're going to find the anther, which is where your pollen is, and you're gonna find a female flower and just wipe that pollen from the anther right onto the female flower.

You can also use a paintbrush, and you can simply take those male flowers, open them up, gather a little bit of that pollen on your paintbrush, and transfer it to your female flowers.

And then once you do that, you will be using just something simple like a wide painter's tape to tape those flowers shut.

Once you do that, the squash will be pollinated.

That will stay true to seed for the next generation, and you can save those seeds for next year's garden to enjoy or to share with friends.

Pollinators play a vital role both in our environment and on our plates, in farms and in our gardens.

So the next time you think about chemical pest control or weed control, give it another think.

Respect those pollinators, protect those pollinators, and try to minimize the applications that you spread around your house or around your garden.

We can all play a role in protecting our environment and those pollinators need us.