Late last week I spent some time looking at my milkweed patches for signs of monarch caterpillars. It is one of those activities that no matter how many times I do it, it is always filled with hopeful anticipation for me. I have three main patches. The first patch is common milkweed, next to my…
For the last 18 years, we’ve had a home fruit orchard. I can’t call it a backyard orchard as it was at our first home in the mid-west, as our 30 trees are in our front yard at our current house. It’s been so long that we’ve had fruit-growing in our yard, I really almost…
Our garden club theme this year is on Pollinators, of which we have covered Bats, Hummingbirds, and Bees. They are all fascinating, but as I prepared for the bee unit, I learned many things I didn’t know. There are solitary bees and social bees. The social bees are the ones everyone seems to talk about….