Visit Earthwise Farm and Garden on Market Day

If you need more reasons to visit the Earthwise Farm and Garden on market day, here's some more views from this inspiring haven. (Check out the posts below to see other views of the garden.)

Font love!

This dry riverbed is a fantastic garden feature for biodiversity. All kinds of ground-nesting insects were sunning on the rocks.

 Have you ever seen such a cute wasp?

It's got the face of an andrena bee and the "waist" of a wasp. The antennae were quivering, as in many parasitic wasps. And look at those long legs! It's like a cartoon.

Airy Verbena bonariensis is used all over the place at this site to great effect. Growing it behind lower plants is such a great way to layer in some more blossoms for bees.

This bumblebee was twerking these stamens big time, buzz-pollinating these lovely roses.

This is where you purchase your veggies inside the barn.

I can attest to the deliciousness of this jam and the tomatoes above. We also bought some of their natural ink made of walnuts, which I am going to use to sketch some bees and wasps. Did you know you can even use it as a hair dye?

 

When you're inside the market you can check out the barn owl cam to see the mother on her nest.

There were a lot of sand wasps here and they seem to love brown-eyed Susan flowers, but basically everywhere there were bees there were bembix.

I like the way the patterns on the back of the wasp echo the patterns in the oregano.

Can you spot the hummer on the very bottom branch of the right side of the tree?

Lots more organic plants for sale in the back! And don't forget to bring cash!

Earthwise Pickerel Weed

 Artist Jasna Guy and I were fascinated by this bog plant, which the bees were giving their love. She identified it as pickerel weed. Look at those yellow nectar guide spots. It has such a luminous color. Jasna found there is a melissodes bee that has a close association to this plant. (It looks a lot like the long-horned bee in the post below, but that is to be confirmed.)

Having a water feature can increase the biodiversity in your garden exponentially. I imagine these boggy plants may be a good source of nectar, especially in dry weather.

And speaking of biodiversity, look at all these wasp galls!

If you've got a boggy area in your garden, this is a good place to visit for inspiration. They also have organic plants for sale at reasonable prices.

Douglas's spirea, how I adore ya.

 There are some very cute signs in the garden.

Must not play with fuzzy seeds. I am very happy with this photo of one of my favorite wildflowers for bees and a very healthy looking leafcutter bee.

Bees in the Margins: Earthwise Farm and Gardens

About as soon as I could walk, dad used to take me out on the land looking for arrowheads. I got to have an intuitive sense of where I would find one. I never verbalized it, just went for the spots where my heart told me to go. Same thing goes for finding bees.

Earthwise has a lovely bee garden with signage and bee plants. My heart told me to keep looking--the hotspot would be elsewhere.  "Oh, if you're looking for honeybees, the hives are in that direction," a gardener tells me. I head for the hives, but only because they are in patchy scrappy weedy land and that's where the interesting native bees are going to live. This patch of goldenrod was just outside the farm itself. It was full of sand wasps and these lovely melissodes. The sand wasps were kind of hopping from flower to flower and this long-horned bee was just tiptoeing from one bunch of florets to another.

I think she needed a rest.

 Then I passed by the boggy ditch where the loosestrife, tansy, and Douglas's spirea was blooming and found this cool patch of teasel. Look at the awesome markings on the thorax of this bumblebee. There's a perfect circle.

 There were also Vosnesensky and Eastern bumblebees all over the garden and here in the liminal lands. There were also snakes and blackberry vines, which shredded my legs, even in jeans. I suffer for bees.

Isn't this amazing? Well, it is if you can't see the signs in the adjacent fields, which tell you to stay off them or you'll be blasted by a shotgun. Why? They are being developed into a residential zone. What a waste of arable land. I can't believe it. See that goldenrod patch above? There's going to be a road going right over it.

There are the hives, way out in the bluff.

Here's the lovely scruffy boggy ditch. The bees on the edges here can't even by harassed by me--way too dangerous unless I bring a wet suit next time. Hmmmmm.