Pre-registration required.

Cost: $25 (25% off for BGA Members)

Talk about picky eaters! Monarch butterflies have captured the imagination of young and old with their exclusive milkweed diet and unfathomable migration from Canada to Mexico. This class will cover everything from milkweed seed collection and stratification to species options for different settings, dangers of tropical milkweed, the milkweed insect community, raising monarchs responsibly, reporting monarch sightings, and tagging monarchs.

Instructor

An avid wildlife habitat gardener and environmental educator for over 25 years, Kim Bailey has a true passion for pollinators. In 2014, she moved to family property in Fruitland, NC, and founded Milkweed Meadows Farm. Generations ago, the property was a working dairy farm. Today, instead of producing milk, the farm grows milkweed as well as native wildflower seeds, open-pollinated heirloom vegetable seeds, pollinator-friendly potted plants, cut flowers, and specialty fruits. Living tunnels of passion vines, pipevines, and climbing milkweeds benefit a diversity of butterfly species while an orchard of over 100 pawpaw trees specifically nurture zebra swallowtails. Kim not only enjoys gardening for bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and other wildlife at the farm, but loves sharing knowledge about creating pollinator habitats with others by regularly teaching classes and giving presentations. Kim’s experiences include teaching middle school life science classes, leading wilderness adventure trips, directing outdoor environmental education programs, and training teachers and naturalists. She has also volunteered for Master Gardeners, Master Pomologists, Georgia Native Plant Society, Monarch Across Georgia, Bee City USA, and National Wildlife Federation’s Habitat Stewards. She first visited the monarch overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico in 2002 and has since co-led many trips to the monarch biosphere region.