Honey Harvest 2014 and Ironweed blooming ...

Wildflower Update:  No measurable rain again this week even though thunder storms passed nearby.  The ironweed and goldenrod are starting to bloom.  Passion flower (maypop) is blooming and the common milkweed pods are maturing and numerous.  Below, maypop blooming in one of our milkweed oasis.  Also below, a small patch of dodder (a parasitic plant).

Pollinators and Wildlife:  Deer family groups are reforming and some have their growing fawns with them.  Below, a clearwing moth this evening settling in on a butterfly bush.  We have seen a mother racoon with two half grown cubs in the field behind our house on several occasions.  

Work on the Farm:  This week we took off honey.  This year's honey was much clearer than usual.  We extracted ours on Tuesday and a teaching collegue brought her supers over on Wednesday to extract.  I put the emptied frames in supers out to dry today which brought thousands of honeybees to move the honey that remained back to their hives.  It was interesting to see all the other bees and wasps that were attracted to the feast.  A few European hornets showed up later in the day to chase down honeybees.  We spent some time this weeked watering our nectar plots.

Hiking, wildflower/wildlife photography, birdwatching and native plant research available on request.  The Kentucky Wildflower Farm will be offering seed from locally collected native plant species in 2015.

Tiger Swallowtails arrive and seed collection begins ...

Wildflower Update:  Our cupflowers, rosinweed and greyheaded coneflowers are in full bloom.  Beach Plums are not native to Kentucky and blooms early in the spring but, we are picking the fruit this week to make Beach Plum Jelly.  Ironweed and Wingstem will be blooming soon if we could get a good rain.  Milkweed, butterfly weed, and illinois bundleweed (below) are putting on seedpods ... butterfly weed pods are ready to collect ( below).

Pollinators and Wildlife Update:  Still alot of bumblebees on coneflowers in our nectar plots (mostly zinnias).  The Tiger Swallowtails (top of the page, a female),  pipevine swallowtails (below) and spicebush swallotails are now in abundance. The goldfinches are raiding our sunflowers and amphibians are frequently found among the wildflowers.  

Great Spangled Fritillary on a zinnia.

Work on the Farm:   We are still tansplanting some perennials for seed collection next year ... blue false indigo, butterfly weed and tennessee coneflowers.  We are getting ready to take off our honey and extract it in the next few days ... hopefully a cooler day.  No rain again today even though it rained all around us.

Hiking, wildflower/wildlife photography, birdwatching and native plant research available on request.  The Kentucky Wildflower Farm will be offering seed from locally collected native plant species in 2015.

Bear's foot and bumble bees ...

Wildflower Update:  This week's bloom is between summer flowers and the beginning of fall blooming plants.  The Common milkweed, bee balm and butterfly weed bloomings are ending.  Starting to bloom are cup plant, rosin weed, passionflower, illinois bundleweed, coneflowers, swamp milkweed and black-eyed susans.  In our wooded areas we found yellow leafcup (Polymnia uvedalia, also bear's foot) and tall bellflower.  Wingstem, pokeweed and ironweed are a week or two away.

Illinois bundleweed bloom (about 1/2) inch across in our seed garden.

Several tall bellflowers among the bear's foot.

Yellow Leafcup or Bear's Foot in a wooded area surrounded by iron weed.

Partridge Pea (Cassia fasciculata) plants are blooming in our pollinator oases.

Pollinators and Wildlife Update: We have lots of bees still working the few flowers we have blooming. At night, the bumble bees are dormant and are often found by the dozens under bee balm blooms or attached to coneflowers.  They are often covered with dew.  Lots of butterflies still ... some swallowtails populations have been slow to appear.
Family groups of deer are starting to form again since the fawns are older. While finishing up a couple of small places bush-hogging, I have seed raccoons and eastern box turtles.  This morning saw a large tailed animal low to the ground exiting a soybeen field ... not sure what it was.

I was surprised the number of bees working several plants of yellow leafcup in our woods.

Work on the Farm:  Still bush-hogging bee pastures.  We are getting ready to plant some food plots which we will make into native plant patches next year.  Our food plots contain buckwheat, oats and austrian peas.

We allow hiking, wildflower/wildlife photography, birdwatching and native plant research by request.  The Kentucky Wildflower Farm will be offering seed from locally collected native plant species in 2015.

Milkweed, Skippers and Mountain Mint

Wildflower Update:  Our milkweed colonies and bee balm are past peak for bloom.  Several common milkweed plants and butterfly weed have small pods present.  Our pollinator pasture still has Dutch white clover blooming.  I also saw this week some soapwort that probably escaped from an nearby old cemetery plot.  We have grey-headed coneflower, maypop, american germander and purple conflower in full bloom.  Just starting to bloom is cup plant and hoary mountain mint.  All our siphiums were planted last year to harvest seed later this summer.  I appears we will get seed from rosin weed and cup plants.  Below,  hoary mountain mint (Pycnanthemum incanum), cup plant bloom and swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) planted this year in bud.

Pollinators and Wildlife Update:  This week while bush-hogging, I saw several raccoons eating blackberries, including two kits with their mother.  The nectar flow is limited this week so there were lots of pollinators at our milkweed patches ... skippers, bumblebees, honeybees, moths and many more. Below, a crowded umbrel with skippers and bumblebees sharing nectar ... three skippers (Sachems ?) on a coneflower ... a Peck's skipper on a coneflower ... Eastern Tailed-Blue on white clover.

Work on the farm:  This week we finished our spring bush-hogging (tractor problems earlier).  We also transplanted native plants in an oasis (600 square feet) along a ridge top overlooking Long Creek (cup plant, compass plant, rosin weed, coneflower, grey-headed coneflower, rattlesnake master, big blue stem, indian grass, common milkweed and more) and we planted some big blue stem, rattlesnake master and cup plant plugs within our existing milkweed colonies.

In the beginning ...

The Kentucky Wildflower Farm is a rewilding work in progress near Holland, KY.  We have 400 acres being managed in this diverse effort. It started about five years ago when we removed the cattle from this farm and began to selectively bush-hog our fields in hopes of establishing a wildflower / pollinator farm.  We have several hives of honeybees. Our farm lies near Long Creek, a tributary of Barren River.  We have eight springs, several seeps and three limestone outcroppings.  55 acres of second bottom is cropped in corn or soybeans.  The Kentucky Wildflower Farm currently serves as a University of Kentucky research site for selected native plants.

There are large populations of goldenrod, wingstem, ironweed, passionflower, american germander and common milkweed.  In our wooded areas (mixed hardwood) which make up nearly half the farm, we have large popluations of twin leaf, mayapples and spicebush.  We have the largest sourwood tree in Allen County on this farm.  Our spring wildflowers include large white trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, foam flower and many more.

We have been planting wildflower oases and ridgetop plantings in several areas to increase the wildflower diversity and native plant seed load.  Next year, we will move six acres of bottom ground into the CRP-pollinator program with our Conservation Agency.  We have bush-hogged around all milkweed colonies (over 50 colonies) for several years.  Some of these colonies now include over 100 adult flowering plants.

There has been an increase of pollinators each year.  This year to date, we have observed 19 Monarch butterflies.  Our wildlife populations have recovered and we now have several quail and rabbits.  Deer are abundant and we often observe bobcats, coyotes, racoons and skunks.  It is a birdwatching paradise.

We allow limited hiking, wildlife photography, birdwatching and native plant research by request.  The Kentucky Wildflower Farm will be offering seed from locally collected native plant species in 2015.