Yesterday in the rain, 3000 native plant plugs were delivered to Hope Church from North Creek Nurseries. 14 different species of native plants will be planted on Saturday. They include Asclepias incarnate, Asclepias tuberosa, Aster novae-angliae, Baptisia australis, Coreopsis tripteris, Eupatorium d. “Little Joe”, Heliopsis helianthoides, Liatris spicate, Monarda fistulosa, Penstemon digitalis, Pycnanthemum flexuosum, Rudbeckia flu. ‘Goldsturm’, Rudbeckia lacinata and Vernonia noveboracensis. Today we started pre-drilling the holes in the meadow for planting day.
The seeds are starting to sprout in the meadow and can be seen in rows. The taller stalks in the rows are the oats and in between the oats are very small native plant seedlings starting to sprout!
The common milkweed is starting to fill in and monarchs are already starting to lay eggs on the young shoots. Our meadow is now registered on monarchlab.org as a monarch monitoring site. Cammy Freed has completed training with the University of Minnesota and will be conducting weekly monarch egg, larva, and adult reports. The University of Minnesota has a program that collects data on monarch butterflies from a trained citizen scientist. Their mission statement is “Our mission is to better understand the distribution and abundance of breeding monarchs and to use that knowledge to inform and inspire monarch conservation”. Stay tuned for updates on the monarch population in Hope Meadow.