Attract a Host of Pollinators With a Backyard Pollinator Garden Perfect for Containers

It's estimated that pollinators are to thank for 1 in 3 bites of food you eat. Their industrious work allows you to enjoy your morning cup of coffee or tea, the avocado, tomatoes and carrots in your salad, a midafternoon snack of almonds, and even the chocolate you savored for dessert — plus — the agave (ahem, tequila!), sugar and lime in your margarita. Thanks, pollinators!

Clearly, we have so much to thank pollinators for. Keep clicking to learn how to create a dedicated area for them to feed on nectar, gather pollen and enjoy a quick sip of water before continuing the necessary work of cross-pollinating 30 percent of the world's food crops and 90 percent of our wild plants.

Deciding which plants to choose can be confusing. Bees are naturally drawn to flowers in the yellow, white or blue-purple color range while butterflies can't resist blooms that are shades of pink, purple, red, yellow and orange. Thanks to their long slender beaks, hummingbirds prefer flowers with a vase-like shape, like foxglove, while night pollinators — bats and moths — prefer white or heavily scented blooms they can easily detect in the dark.

For the stacked planter you'll need: small and large whiskey barrels (available at your local garden center or hardware store), a bucket that's a bit shorter than the larger barrel, potting soil, rocks, broken pottery or pool noodles (optional) to fill the bottom of the planter and provide additional drainage and an assortment of pollinator-friendly plants. We used: echinacea, gaillardia, verbena, pentas, garden phlox, salvia, scaevola, aster, balloon plant, sunflowers, zinna and yarrow.