It has been a big year for the Borderlands Restoration Network Native Plant Program's farmed seed project. Between purchasing the farm on which we operate this past spring, expanding our growing area by an acre over the summer, and making record harvests in the fall, it has been a year of great success! Here are some highlights:
For our project "Expanding Seed Sources and Creating Pollinator Corridors in the Madrean Archipelago," funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's Monarch and Pollinators Conservation Fund, we made significant headway on expanding our farmed seed plot to include numerous native milkweed species! We added an additional acre of growing space for milkweed seed production under landscape fabric to mitigate weed pressure and with drip irrigation to support these sensitive herbaceous plants to thrive. We planted 4,000 milkweeds into this plot with the help of two incredible teams from the AmeriCorps National Community Conservation Corps program between May and August. We plan on putting nearly 10,000 milkweeds in this plot by the end of 2025, so we are right on track to reach our goals to support milkweed seed production for monarch habitat restoration projects for years to come.
Our farmed plot has also continued to produce seed for numerous contracts, nursery production, and public sale. We harvested grass seed from our Sand Dropseed plot, which we established through a contract with the Institute for Applied Ecology and has continued to thrive with minimal irrigation in its 6th harvest year!
Bumble bees on the blooming Beardlip Penstemon row.
Our rows of Blue Grama for the Petrified Forest National Park also continued to thrive in their 6th year, and we increased our harvest amount from our commercial rows significantly. Additionally, we made our first harvests of species added to the farm plot with the 2023 Borderlands Earth Care Youth (BECY) cohort for retail and nursery production, including Beardlip Penstemon and Beebalm/Wild Bergamot. Although these species took a whole year to produce flowers, they were worth the wait!
We had an incredible bloom event from our Beardlip Penstemon row, which attracted hundreds of bumblebees, hummingbirds, and other pollinator species with its vivid flowers and sweet nectar. This row allowed for a large harvest of a species that would otherwise be difficult to collect in abundance from the wild. The Beebalm is also a species that we usually have to travel further in order to make wild collections, so harvesting a good amount of seed from on-site is both economically beneficial for our program as well as beneficial in terms of reducing pressure on wild populations from harvest. Plus, it helps make our field season just a little bit easier!
Looking forward, we hope to rapidly expand grass seed production on the farm, finish planting our milkweed plot, and scheme about what other cool native wildflower species we can add to our farm plot in 2025!