Kester and Kester Farms

06/01/2026

🤠

05/31/2026

Well fertilized 😬

05/30/2026

Finally dry enough to get the organic taters in 🥳

05/24/2026

Poisoning the population

05/16/2026

Turning some ground this morning

05/06/2026

Celebrating my 6th year on Facebook. Thank you for your continuing support. I could never have made it without you. 🙏🤗🎉

04/30/2026

She Sealed the Door, Then Lay Down to Die
In late April, in a hollow stem behind your shed, a small metallic-blue bee is finishing the last act of her life. She has spent six weeks alone, building a single column of mud chambers, each one stocked with pollen, each one holding one egg.
Now she walls up the entrance with mud. She will not see her children hatch. She will be dead within days.
We swat her at the porch light. We seal up "wasp holes" in the eaves. We assume any bee that doesn't live in a hive is somehow wrong.
In reality, the native Blue Orchard Mason Bee (Osmia lignaria, Status: Secure but in regional decline) is one of the most efficient pollinators in North America. A single female pollinates as many apple flowers as 100 honeybees. She is solitary, she is stingless in practice, and she will be entirely dead before her own offspring chew their way out of the mud next spring.
Leave the hollow stems standing through winter. Drill no-pesticide nest blocks. Her motherhood is a single sealed door — and we keep painting over it.
References: Xerces Society pollinator profiles; USDA-ARS Logan Bee Lab (Osmia lignaria); Cornell Cooperative Extension orchard pollinator data.

04/08/2026

04/05/2026

Major upgrade in the cow barn this weekend 🥳