- January: Grow coast live oaks from acorns collected on a nearby walk (and then give the trees up for adoption when you have nowhere to plant them. Oops!)
- February: Provide a place in the back yard for gulf fritillary caterpillars to turn into beautiful butterflies
- March: Accidentally discover some Palmer’s grapplinghook (California Native Plant Society-listed rare plant) on a nearby hike, also spend too many hours watching a Bewick’s wren bring back nesting material to the bird house you put up
- April: Stare confusedly at your garden plants and wonder why they are growing so slowly. Are they even growing at all? (Spoiler alert, you have to fertilize them.)
- May: Laugh hysterically at your neighbor’s lawn. Nature, which has no shame, is showing off a specimen of Phallus impudicus (common stinkhorn mushroom). Also, watch the Bewick’s wrens who started nest building in March tirelessly feeding their chicks, which leave the nest at the end of the month and slowly make their way through the neighbors’ back yards in a little gang of five.
- June: Revel in the tremendous haul of carrots your garden provided. Start researching carrot recipes so this bounty does not go to waste.
- July: Watch two Sonoran bumblebees make sweet hymenopteran love on the pavement outside the house; creep slowly up to your pumpkin flowers, trying not to scare off any bees, to see if they are getting pollinated by anything other than honeybees (they are getting visited by native squash bees, Peponapis pruinosa. ! How did the bees find our tiny pumpkin patch in the middle of the city? Can they smell the pumpkin plants?? Nature is amazing!); observe a honeybee-mimic robber fly successfully hunting honeybees in the garden
- August: Plant a zucchini plant in the front yard with the help of assistant…later get a notice of violation from the homeowner’s association
- September: Begin sacrificing our tomato plants to the tomato hornworms. They make wonderful pets and don’t mind being handled by the kids, and they turn into beautiful sphinx moths in the spring. Just don’t dig up the soil to find the pupae, because they look like something out of the movie Silence of the Lambs. IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET! Watch a beautiful dragonfly hunting insects flying above the garden. While we watch him, he watches us watching him.
- October: Find shriveled spider on walk with kids and determine after hours of research and child neglect, that it is, in fact, a tarantula; give children a mycology lesson complete with spore prints and (surprisingly) find that one of the mushrooms has GREEN spores, much to the 4-year-old’s delight.
- November: Mentor a young gardener
- December: Stalk the Botta’s pocket gopher which has taken up residence in the neighborhood. Implore the children not to try to pet it, as it has grown so tame (due to some neighbor’s feeding it broccoli)
Happy Holidays from Balk Biological! We hope you enjoyed some nature too, and hopefully enjoyed the time with your families. See you in 2021!
Michelle Balk, CEO