If you're looking to celebrate California Biodiversity Day...
The UC Davis Student Farm Ecological Garden, also known as "The Eco Garden," will be the site of a California Biodiversity Day event on Saturday, Sept. 12 from 9 a.m. to noon. It's free and family friendly.
The half-acre garden is located on the UC Davis campus at 180 Extension Center Drive.
The challenge is to find at least 30 different species with the @inaturalistorg app on "your smart phone," the organizers said. "No experience is necessary, and all ages are invited." Or folks can taste veggies, check out the nature crafts or just enjoy the garden.
The Eco Garden's Instagram account describes the site as a "teaching space on campus focused on ecological horticulture, seed saving and sustainable agriculture. Students manage the garden year-round, growing vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, native plants and flowers for the Flower Project, which sells bouquets through a CSA (community-supported agriculture). The garden also serves as a site for composting projects and for food justice, like Fresh Focus, which donates produce to address campus food insecurity."
UC Davis Distinguished Professor (now emerita) Lynn Kimsey of the Department of Entomology and Nematology and former director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, used to hold entomology classes in the ecological garden to collect and identify insects.
The garden is a rare public gem, where you can listen to the birds, photograph insects, walk between the rows of vegetable and flower gardens, and admire the trees bearing pomegranates, oranges and other fruit.
On our visit to the garden on June 28, we saw monarch butterflies, pipevine swallowtails, cabbage white butterflies, honey bees, yellow-faced bumble bees, carpenter bees, squash bees, long-horned bees, syrphid flies, aphids, milkweed bugs, spiders, spittle bugs, lady beetles (aka ladybugs), ants, squirrels and a flock of visiting turkeys.
And one rabbit and one lizard. Biodiversity everywhere.
Cover image: A furrow bee, genus Halictus, foraging on a sunflower, family Asteraceae, in the UC Davis Student Farm Ecological Garden. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)