Bay Area Butterfly Festival Lands May 19
By Annina Puccio, executive director of the Monarch Milkweed Project
The Monarch Milkweed Project and the Vallejo People’s Garden are hosting the inaugural Bay Area Butterfly Festival on May 19!
Join us and experience the beautiful view of the Carquinez Strait from the boardwalk on Mare Island while learning about the importance of protecting our pollinators. This is a family-friendly community festival!
On two stages, fantastic performers and live bands will delight you with their talents. Children’s free games and hands-on activities will entertain young ones throughout the day. Musical performances will fill the air — dancing is not required, but it is definitely recommended! Artisans and small businesses will sell their art, wares, and many fantastic sustainable goods.
On a third stage, community groups will lead pop-up workshops on a wide range of exciting topics, which will include a talk sponsored by Sustainable Solano by Heath Griffith of Grow With The Flow on how to turn your lawn into a native garden. Food vendors and food trucks will offer a variety of cuisines, including vegan and gluten-free options.
We will be hosting over 100 vendors/exhibitors from various organizations and nonprofits at the event. There will be a focus on sustainable living, clean water practices, and environmental education.
This festival is a low-to-no-waste event focusing on commemorating the historic monarch overwintering site on Mare island, as well as the importance of sustainable practices and saving our pollinators — especially the iconic monarch butterfly and our various native bee species.
Learn more about attending here
On Facebook: https://fb.me/e/3uncrnQqk
Register on Eventbrite: www.bit.ly/BABF2024
Volunteer here
All volunteers get the following: free food and drink, a volunteer festival T-shirt and two free classes at the Vallejo People’s Garden.
Sign up here: https://forms.gle/o3Bx27kFusyriu2P6
Test your soil appropriately — A variety of tests are available to everyday people and many are fairly inexpensive. The most accessible type of test is probably a “nutrient panel” (often called a “soil paste” test), which gives you an idea of the nutrient content of your soil. This will give you a breakdown of each nutrient, soil pH, salinity, etc., depending on the lab and exact type of test. You can learn more about what needs to be addressed in your garden (e.g. a lack of nitrogen, too high a pH, etc.).
Mature front yard food forest has mostly fruit trees and native plants that attract pollinators year-round. It has a laundry-to-landscape greywater system.
A 4-year-old food forest and pollinator garden installed in 2020 that includes a swale that captures roof water and mediterranean trees and plants mixed with native pollinating and nectar plants to attract bees and butterflies. This site is home to a Monarch Waystation that grows a variety of plants to support Western Monarch Butterflies.
A 9-year-old established food forest with two swales that are dug out and refreshed every 2-3 years, laundry-to-landscape greywater to fruit trees, and chickens. The drip irrigation system was removed four years ago and the garden is thriving! Annual beds are hand-watered once a week during the growing season. Greyhawk Grove is a “high-traffic-survival-of-the-fittest-have-three-young-children garden”. There may be lemonade and baked goods for sale by children, as well as products from the garden to give away (dried calendula, lavender, herbs, eggs, fruit, etc.).
Southern slope food forest focused on pollinators, shrubs and native plants. It also includes fruit trees, perennial and edible plants, swales and a laundry-to-landscape greywater system.
An evolving food forest garden and greywater system installed as part of Sustainable Solano’s 2022-23 
This homeowner attended our tours and was inspired to transform his yard! This garden, designed by Michael Wedgley of 
This front yard lawn was replaced in 
Two separate gardens, one is a peace garden with mostly flowers, cactus and trees and the other is the vegetable garden, called Johnson Ranch. The vegetable garden was revived through the 
Morningside Botanical Bounty food forest was created as part of the 
Pollinator food forest garden filled with a variety of California native plants that support the habitat of butterflies, bees, moths, wasps, hummingbirds and so much more. This garden was installed in February 2023 as a collaboration with a variety of organizations including Vallejo People’s Garden, Vallejo Project, Solano Resource Conservation District and Monarch Milkweed Project. Alanna Mirror wrote three songs inspired by the installation, featured in her 
Vallejo Project’s Unity Garden initiative restored an abandoned lot that was once filled with sand and garbage and turned it into a multi-level food forest with internationally influenced farming techniques, a mealworm farm and chickens. This garden is focused on urban agriculture.
We’ve seen creative and innovative ways individuals, organizations and cities have supported such projects. In Berkeley, the Ecology Center runs
Composting requires a little forethought, some dedicated space, and the diligence to do regular light maintenance. If you can keep a houseplant alive, you should be able to get a compost bin started. The most important thing with backyard composting is to choose a system that will work best for you, which you feel you can sustain long-term. There are two common options for at-home composting, “hot pile” and “vermicompost” (or worm bins).
A vermicompost system relies on worms to digest and process organic matter to create compost. These systems offer more flexibility compared to a traditional hot pile system. Vermicompost systems can be made in any size, allowing them to fit into more spaces (some people keep their bins under their kitchen sink). Vermicompost systems do require more careful planning than a hot-pile system. While worm bins do not need to be turned, bins need to be emptied more regularly and the worm populations need to be divided to prevent overcrowding. Worm bins also typically cannot be added daily: worms eat in “batches”, so waste needs to be collected and added all as a single, larger quantity. I would recommend worm bins for smaller families, or people who might lack the space or volume of material needed to start a hot pile system. 