Happy Apple's Farm

03/21/2024

Botanical Belonging is holding special field forays this season at a beautiful property nearby. Next Thursday (3/28) is the virtual orientation. Registration is live on the botanicalbelonging.org website. Sign up now!

We hope you’ll join us for a special Field Foray project this year! “Stable M” is a 73-acre tract with woodlands and floodplain forests around a 10-acre lake.

Botanical Belonging is on a mission to catalog all(!) the diversity this site holds, and we want your help! Come with us to learn how to identify plants and record your observations with the app iNaturalist - and explore this awesome place.

Virtual orientation is next Thursday (3/28) from 7-8pm on Zoom.

Registration is live: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/79067e9c-d1e7-4f8a-a35d-a1e371d709a4

And save the date for each of our Stable M Field Forays (located 5 minutes south of Botanical Belonging):
Second Thursday of the month, April-October, 6-8pm.
A Virtual Wrap-Up will be held Thursday November 14, 7-8pm.

03/19/2024

Join Botanical Belonging and Eudora Giving Garden for a series of workshops about planning, planting and caring for a native plant garden. It starts this Saturday, March 23rd!

Spring is almost here - what's in your garden? Would you like to learn more about using native plants in a hands-on workshop? Here are some of the things that will be covered in our upcoming Native Plants Workshop starting 3/23:

WHY native plants
- Habitat
- Invasive species
Steps for designing your garden
- How to create a space that works
- Estimating # of plants
- Choosing appropriate native plants
- Arranging plants in a garden

You'll be helping to create our new Prairie Garden as part of the workshop. We hope you'll join us !

02/17/2024

Interested in seeds? Want to meet great local people who love gardens and nature? Come and trade seeds and explore local vendors at the Kaw Valley Seed Fair tomorrow, Saturday, February 17th, from 8:00 am to 2:30 pm at the Douglas County Fairgrounds. Visit our booth! We’re sponsors this year and can’t wait to share what we have planned for the season.

02/11/2024

Caring Community. We’re grateful that people came together on this perfect day to care for the prairie. Creating a patchwork of habitat in this relatively small prairie with lots of standing fuel requires careful planning. We lit slow backing (into the wind) fires to create generous “black lines,” and we carefully monitored shifting wind. A beautiful team (including 2 not pictured) and a portable watering system for keeping mowed firebreaks wet are the only reasons we can light any ferocious head (carried with wind) fires with this much standing dry grass. And with this careful process we participate, along with our ancient and powerful partners, wind and fire, in nurturing a diverse community that we call prairie.

02/03/2024

First flowers. Missouri native Vernal/Ozark Witch-Hazel (Hamamelis vernalis) seems to agree with the famous groundhog. Spring is in the air…at least today. These delicate little petals don’t mind the cold. If winter returns, they simply curl up and wait for another warm day.

01/31/2024

Tiny bit of cleanup. These warm winter days are awesome for drawing me into the garden…and then I want to clean things up. But it’s too soon, right? In general, I think the answer is yes, let’s leave as much as we can for pollinator habitat. And, in addition, let’s make sure our gardens maintain edges…so they appeal and attract the humans. First and second photos feature Solidago drummondii (after trimming, then before) to expose the rock edge but leaving a majority of stems intact for pollinators. The remaining 4 photos show sedges. Both the Kansas native Carex albicans (photos 3 and 4) and a very similar and popular spreading Missouri native Carex pensylvanica (photos 5 and 6) benefit from a late winter trim to remove some of the dead foliage. They will have flower culms forming before I know it, and they’re easy to damage if I wait much longer.

01/16/2024

Birdseed. Our gardens look messy…and that’s good! With today’s sun, I ventured out to see what all of those birds I’ve been watching are eating. They love everything about the south side of our house. The first and second photos show bird wing prints, footprints and seeds around Ratibida pinnata. The third photo shows evidence of abundant feeding around Symphyotrichum oblongifolium. And last, but certainly not least, the birds are loving the seeds of common ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia). Yes, it is good for something.

01/14/2024

It will be summer again (I promise), so let’s make a plan to explore nature! Join us at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, January 16th, at Basehor Community Library. Reconnecting people with native plants is what we do. Let’s make it happen for everyone. We’re looking forward to introducing ourselves to new friends, reviewing our year with friends who know us well and exploring everyone’s ideas!

01/08/2024

Ready for the cold. We knew at some point the cold of winter would arrive, so this year we invested in some row cover. And, rather than move every potted retail plant and lug big straw bales like usual, this year we consolidated plants close to where they’ve been all season and covered them. With any luck, this row cover that’s draped over the tightly packed pots and tucked in securely will protect just as well as our old system of a straw bale wind break (and no cover at all). The old way worked surprisingly well, but the volume of plants we have now makes moving everything impossible. If nothing else, this new arrangement should make the spring task of unpacking overwintered stock amazingly simple. Can’t wait to see how it works!

01/06/2024

Wasn’t that a beautiful snowfall? But, as lovely as it is, all that moisture makes our prairie grass too wet for burning. So we’re postponing our burn in hopes that better weather comes soon. Please watch our events page on botanicalbelonging.org for a new demonstration burn date as soon as things dry out a bit.