Pollinator Week

Since it is Pollinator Week, I want to point out some of our successes from the last few seasons we've had in our attempts to participate in bringing more pollinators to our course.  Our efforts have had their ups and downs, (which might be from mostly flying by the seat of our pants), but considering our lack of knowledge we have had some successes.  I hope to follow up with some things we have tried when establishing our areas.

                

The above pictures are from our first year in 2016, planting a Missouri Wildflower Mix, in an area of our old driving range that sits between our 1st and 9th holes.  These pictures are from April and May of that year.

These pictures above come from late June and early July of 2016.  We were pretty happy with our results and the different looks during the season.

In 2017 we saw results like this below in June and early July.  Then the area seemed to be taken over by ragweed it appeared.  We ended up mowing all of it down in August.  We were still hopeful that the seeds would create a similar result in 2018.

                  

           

The one surprise from 2017 was spotting this common milkweed that had come into a small section of our natural area, just outside of where we seeded the wildflower mix.

                 

This spring (2018) we were somewhat surprised at the amount of common milkweed that had come in this year.  It had spread from a small maybe 10 x 10 area to now across between both holes.

We also were excited to see some pollinators in the area of the milkweed, including what appears to be a Monarch Butterfly (in the pictures below)

                          

Unfortunately we are not seeing the wildflowers in this area this year.  There seems to be much ragweed, and we were not able to try any control methods prior to their huge growth.  We will make some attempts, trying different products and trials to remove some of the plant material we would like to get rid of.

               

We did see in our field trail plots above some of these plants in a planting that we did in the spring of this year.  We installed it to allow us to try maybe different herbicides to remove unwanted material and not be as upset if we damaged the wildflowers.  There were two different planting methods used.  It was funny that we tried the same methods in another area of the golf course and did not receive the same results.

We also were surprised to find another type of milkweed growing in another native area that just seemed to show up on it's own.

         

While we haven't achieved the look we were possibly going for, we will continue to try and expand our pollinator offerings.  I will continue to research and have already taking a couple of seminars that I think will help us moving forward.

Thanks for reading!

Mel