Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Need Help Building a Butterfly Education & Exploration Site, 1 by SingingWolf

SingingWolf wrote:
Hi pollengarden. Thanks for your comments and suggestions. :-)
I do plant for hummers & bflies. It's so much easier to plant nectar plants for them, than to set out food for them. I do have some hanging feeders, but the wind is pretty strong and blows the hummer food out. It's easier to plant for them. I do have a couple of feeders hanging inside the greenhouse, but since the Mama hummer started taking over the greenhouse last year, she hasn't really let the other hummers in to use them. Except her kids of course. She lets them come around.
I also like taking photos of them nectaring on plants instead of the feeders. It's a lot more challenging, and certainly more appealing to my eye.
I've been watching a lot of the DIY yard improvement type shows. I saw one yesterday that I thought might work for the waterfall. I'll have to draw a picture, and see if I can scan it to show you what I mean.
I like the idea of kids exploring textures. Here's a photo I took at another farm that grows fruit. It's a new type of farm they are into agritourism. It's something our farm will end up doing. With our own flair of course. They are primarily a pick your own berry farm. We are just getting into the fruit, but have been growing Christmas trees, and pumpkins for years.
I've been doing educational field trips for years as well. I used to do four different ones each year. Depending on the season of course. Oh, and the average age of the kids is 5-6 years old.
We had the Pumpkin Patch field trip, where I explained how a pumpkin grows, and what it needs to grow. Then we'd take 'em out to the patch and have them identify different parts of the plant. We gave away a lot of stickers for rewards. :-) At Christmas time, we talk about the trees, and how they grow, how we trim them, and market them. I always loved giving the Nature Hike, and telling the kids about the local wild flowers. I am working on a self-guided hike these days, since I don't have the energy any more to give guided hikes. Then there was the Tipi Village fieldtrip. While that one was probably the hardest in terms of time and labor, it was also the most rewarding for me. I let the kids grind corn, using real manos and metates. I must be crazy for wanting to add the butterfly site. Nah, I'm not crazy, I'm inspired.

This first photo is from their fruit farm. They have a play area for kids. I kind of liked this idea, although, I have to wonder how they keep critters out of the corn in this pool. Last year they were overrun by squirrels. This year, I didn't see a single one. I should ask how they did that.

I promised more photos of the proposed B.fly site. So I went out and took this photo, just before 7 in the morning. It's the only time of day that it receives shade. We are looking toward the elderberry tree here.

The next three are photos of the slope that will be the boundary on one side. It makes sense to build the waterfall on the slope to take advantage of the slope. Where would you all put the waterfall, upon seeing these photos?

More photos on next post.

WIB~
SW