A Preamble (or was that ‘Pre-ramble’?) of Sorts.

It can be useful to periodically restate what it is we’re trying to do. The following are a few words that were shared at the 17 Dec. 2025 meeting of the Research Circle. In part, they’re meant to help newcomers understand what we’re up to and to answers some questions we have received.

1. The Research Circle is not the project of any one person or organization. While we are fortunate to get funding from the Farm Hub and the Circle includes staff from Hawthorne Valley, it really derives from a shared desire to work together on topics of mutual interest. Some of us have been at this (on-farm ecological research, farming) for a while, and we are searching for ways to build a community of like-minded individuals to design, execute and act upon ecological research of the community’s own design. 
2. That means that the Circle has no other existence than all of you, all of us. It exists for as long as we want it to and in the shape we choose for it. It is very much a work in progress. Some of us have tried to establish an initial framework in order to get it off the ground but this is intended as a starting point, not an end point. 
3. Reflecting on our own strengths and weaknesses, we as the ecologist did establish one set of boundaries on our own work: There are many, many relevant research questions around farming. We cannot hope to answer them all, nor do we have the capacity to do so. While, to a certain degree, we can bring in the expertise of others, for now what we can offer as researchers is a focus on the role of on-farm habitats in supporting nature for its own sake and for its interaction with production.
4. In this context, the reports presented in the Fall are the research feedback from projects we all designed together the previous Spring and that were carried out during the growing season. The hope is that, over the course of the Winter, we can all consider these results and what they might mean for management and continued research. These are your results, please ask questions, be (constructively) critical – groan loudly, whoop audibly, share thoughts!

The Intentional and the Accidental: The Role of Cultivated and Uncultivated Flowers in Supporting Plant Diversity and Insect Abundance on Farms.

One project whose results we shared on 17 Dec involved studying the support that on-farm flowers provide to pollinators and other flower visitors. How big a contribution to plant biodiversity is provided by the uncultivated (aka “weedy”) flowers found in fallows, lawns, edges and wilder areas relative to flowers seeded for cut flowers, vegetable crops, or intentional pollinator habitat? What role do these same flower play in supporting flower visitors?

We plan a data-rich blog or two exploring these data in more detail. In the meantime, in this talk and these slides, Claudia and Conrad provide a preliminary description of the distribution of such flowers across the seasons and the farms, and summarize how popular the different flowers were with an array of flower visitors. (These links are also available from the Resources page.)