Yes, I have a 'nectar' garden about 1/2 the size of my vegetable garden about 30 feet away. It was originally put in for the honey bees I was raising for a while but since the bee adventure has moved elsewhere i have maintained the nectar garden for butterflies, etc as well as wild bees. No doubt it helps vegetable pollinationWell hell, everybody already said what I was gonna say ... EXCEPT ...
My squash does better in raised beds than it does in the ground here but I suspect it's because my entire yard is the sandiest loam I have ever seen. In fact, I think there is probably about 1% loam -- and I'm being generous with a whole 1%.
All that said, I do have to go out of my way (like get a paintbrush) and manually transfer pollen from the male to female flowers. Dunno why but it's just always been that way here. Same thing with the tomato plants -- I have to shake the stems and make the pollen fall.
That's one of the reasons I'm putting in a pollinator garden around the outside perimeter of the front yard (where my raised beds are). Hopefully next spring I won't have to run around giving the tomato and squash plants help doing what they should be doing on their own with the birds and the bees.
