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Date: 6/27/2022
HADLEY – After buying a plot of land in the Connecticut River floodplain and starting That’s A Plenty Farm in 2007, Cathy and Michael Katz released their Pollinator Garden Planning Deck in May 2022 as their latest effort to encourage a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle and farming and gardening habits.
The deck of cards features 105 wildflowers, shrubs, trees and grasses whose nectar and pollen benefit bees, butterflies, birds and other pollinators. Customers can consider their growing conditions like the soil type, moisture and the amount of sunlight and match that with the deck featuring full-color photos and descriptions of every pollinator plant.
Cathy Katz said in an interview with Reminder Publishing that she went through a database from the North Carolina State Extension and found that most of the plants in the deck are distributed in roughly 40 states. The decks cost $29.99 and are available online at https://www.thatsaplentyfarm.com/store.
“Most of these plants for pollinators are wildflowers and they really want to grow, and they don’t need anything special,” Katz said. “Most of the flowers in the deck will grow pretty much anywhere. Even if only half the flowers in the deck are distributed in your state, that’s a lot of flowers and I also think it’s a good starting point. There may be a flower that you’re interested in and it’s not in your state, but you could take the criteria about that plant and go to a nursery and say, ‘I want something like this. What do you have that’s similar?”
According to their website, they went to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in 2011 and received grants to establish the first NRCS-funded pollinator habitat in western Massachusetts. Katz said the NRCS used a team of experts around the country to help convert what was formerly a cornfield into a pollinator habitat.
Katz said the idea for releasing a deck came years after converting half of the property into a pollinator habitat and finding that she had eventually gained knowledge and an understanding that can otherwise be hard to find from the area’s selection of experts, nurseries and researchers and wanted to bring that information in an easy and palatable way to others.
“Everybody kind of had small amounts of different information but there wasn’t one place to do it,” Katz said. “Over the last five years, we’ve really noticed that there has been quite an increase in interest and people who are really engaged. I guess it was just a growing realization that I had information about pollinator plants. I’m not a horticulturist, with the nurseries around here there’s some really great native plant nurseries, those people know a lot more than I know but I knew that everybody who came to the farm wanted to know, ‘I don’t really know how to start,’ or, ‘What kind of plants do I need?’”
Throughout their own process of converting half their farm, the Katz’s learned rules for successful pollinator habitats. In addition to picking plants that will thrive in your conditions, Katz said the first rule is to have plants that will provide nectar and pollen for the pollinators. She said she encourages people to plant pollinator flowers in islands, so bees don’t burn calories traveling long distances as they often need to gather nectar and pollen to help nurture their babies.
Katz plants lots of milkweeds for monarch butterflies and flowers that provide nectar to a female bee laying eggs such as echinacea or zinnias. Katz added it’s important to have at least three unique types of flowers blooming at any given time from the beginning of Spring until frost, which the deck also helps to narrow down and organize.
“There are so many problems now that feel so complex and we’re looking to other people to solve them,” Katz said. “Individuals can make a difference by planting wildflowers, planting for pollinators and the great thing about planting a pollinator habitat is you’re supposed to leave it alone. It’s not, work at it, work at it, work at it. You install it and then you leave it. This is something that every single one of us could do, it feels like this is a problem we don’t need other people to solve.”
Katz also wanted a habitat with the land surrounded by more conventional farms and to show that there are sustainable ways to farm and grow crops while lessening your impact on the soil, plants and insects.
“There’s lots of conversations about how can we get farmers to spray less pesticide because farmers are very reluctant to change the way they do things, even though the farmers in this area are amazing and care a lot about the environment, it’s very hard to change practices when you’re surviving on something and to trust that by doing it a different way it’s going to work for you,” Katz said. “The thought was that if we had a pollinator habitat right in the middle of the farmland it might help some of the farmers be comfortable about using different methods in their farming.”
She added, “Most agriculture today is large-scale agriculture, it’s all mechanized, there’s a lot of monocropping that goes on and that’s a problem. Spraying, tilling, all those things which are perhaps giving people higher yields of their crops but its depleting the soil which means you have to put more and more into the soil.”
When the Katzes were looking to downsize and live a more environmentally conscious lifestyle, they thought of the Pioneer Valley as the perfect spot. They were familiar with the area after their son attended Amherst College and Katz said they liked the area’s great soil, colleges, river, farms and cultural scene.
Unable to find a suitable house, the Katzes were shown the plot of land along the river where they have since added a 128-square-foot tiny house built on a trailer chassis to be able to live in the floodplain and move when necessary. Katz said the land in the area was originally divided up for the settlers based on how much land one ox could plow in a day, with their farm running just 72-foot wide while being ¼ of a mile long.
“This piece of land that we bought was a three-acre field, it had been a corn field,” Katz said. “The fields out there have been farmed for 1,000 years or more, so they’re pretty depleted in terms of nutrients although the Hadley loam is famous but that’s because it’s river bottom and it handles water perfectly. The particles in the soil are all pretty much the same size so water moves around in this soil, it sticks around and keeps moving and it’s not clay or anything like that. It’s just great soil for planting.”
When the Katz’s first started the farm, their children and grandchildren played an integral role by helping dig, plant, harvest and anything else that was needed for three or four years until the boys graduated college and moved ‘all over the world,’ Katz said.
“Our daughter is still the graphic designer, she designed the deck, she does our website so she does all the artwork for us and our son is still a hands-on farmer and now that we’re much older he does most of the heavy lifting at the farm even though that’s not his job, he’s just doing it,” Katz said. “What it provides us, I think, is we all share in this understanding that you need to be giving back to the world and this seems like a really good way for us to do that so we’re all working together with the natural environment in mind.”