HammMade HammGrown, LLC

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Charlotte, NC
HammMade HammGrown, LLC

One-woman small business dreaming, designing, and digging pollinator habitat since 2024.

11/12/2025

🍂 In honor of Fall cleanup season, let’s play an “I Spy” game!

👀 Can you spot the chrysalises camouflaged as crispy dead leaves in these photos?? I’ve posted each pic twice with the chrysalis circled in the second pic.

Why is this important to share now? Well, when you cut back your plants and trash fallen leaves in the Fall, you’re also throwing away chrysalises! 🐦‍⬛ Plus, birds rely on seeds for winter food (stop buying bird seed when you can provide it for free by simply leaving seed heads on your plants!).

Photo descriptions:
1. Gulf Fritillary butterfly freshly eclosed with the open chrysalis nearby on a tomato plant.
2. Another angle of the same gulf fritillary and broken chrysalis
3. Chrysalis on black eyes susans.
4. Chrysalis on bee balm.
5. Chrysalis on strawflowers.
6. Bonus photo of a gulf fritillary caterpillar hanging off a black eyed Susan in its “J” form, meaning it’s about to form its chrysalis!
7. All of these chrysalises pictured are of Gulf Fritillaries, which use native passionvine as a host plant for their caterpillars. This photo shows the caterpillars munching away on some of the passionvine I provide for them.

How many chrysalises could you find in these photos without the circled version? Do you think you could spot these in your own yard or on a nature walk?!

Being a lazy gardener this Fall = more butterflies in the Spring ✌🏼

09/29/2025

🌻 NATIVE PLANT SALE 🌻

UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens is hosting their annual Fall Plant Sale this upcoming weekend, and their list of available natives is impressively extensive!

Frequently, I hear clients and friends say they’re unfamiliar with the botanical names of plants, so I took it upon myself to make a “common name” cheat sheet of UNCC’s list.

Chefs out UNCC’s website with their complete list (I skipped the non-native perennial section, but there are some lovely ornamentals available there, as well!) :

https://gardens.charlotte.edu/fall-plant-sale-2025

09/24/2025

Last week, an out of control car plowed through my front yard pollinator garden. Hours upon hours of hard work demolished in an instant. The worst damage occurred in an area freshly revamped and planted this past Spring, where I had observed monarch caterpillars earlier in the day. I tallied over 4 dozen injured or destroyed plants.

Understandably, I’m devastated. A piece of me wanted to quit. Turn it all back into lawn - the easy route.

But I’m a stubborn woman. Providing critical habitat to pollinators in my little piece of urban land is a passion, a selfless act of love for these little creatures who desperately need human allies.

Then, yesterday I found a black swallowtail and a monarch chrysalis. The first tears of joy since the accident in my gardens. Life goes on. Nature finds a way. Everything will be okay 💚

09/13/2025

Swallowtail caterpillar on Bronze Fennel 😍

Recently, I’ve also seen monarch and Spicebush swallowtail caterpillars in my gardens, and today I watched a fritillary butterfly lay eggs on passionvine!

Seriously, if you plant it, they will come! 🦋

09/05/2025

👋🏼 Hi! I’ve been pretty quiet this summer (more on that later) but I’m back at it!

🚙 Another day, another SUV overfilled with plants en route to a client! These Carolina Jessamines went to pub and the vines will surround their patio with vibrant yellow blooms come Spring and provide a green backdrop all winter long with their glossy evergreen leaves. Cheers to pints and pollinators! 🍻

07/11/2025

😍 I will never ever get over the absolute adorableness of a bee sleeping in a flower … on my dusk garden stroll this evening I found dozens of sleepy bees enjoying some hard earned 💤’s after a long day of pollinating 🐝

This is non-native sulfur cosmos, which keep reseeding in my garden thanks to a generic wildflower seed mix I spread before I knew anything a few years ago. It seems to be the bees’ favorite napping spot, so I’m leaving some for the moment 🤷🏼‍♀️

06/09/2025

🌸💐🌼 This year’s first real cut flower harvest for dried florals for the HammMade Goods aspect of my business 😍

Pictured:
💐 Strawflower, started by me with seeds from
💐 Leeks! I let most of my leeks bolt and bloom because the flowers are incredible and dry beautifully
💐 Yarrow, purchase as seedlings from my friend

These beauties will hang to dry for several weeks, then be used in everlasting bouquets, wall art, and incorporated into my macrame designs.

Which flower/color is your favorite? 🤩

06/05/2025

🚫🪲 Super weird organic veggie gardening pro tip: a bug vacuum and a death bucket for bad bugs! I’m well aware I look insane taking this handheld battery powered vacuum to my plants, but I want Japanese Beetles, leaf-footed bugs, and squash beetles to leave my veggies and cut flowers alone without harming the plentiful pollinators in my gardens.

🧼🫧 The bucket is Tupperware (obviously, actually, a reused lunch meat container because I can’t handle throwing away plastic) with soapy water. I flick the bad bugs directly in there, which is oddly satisfying 🙈 I’ll lid it and reuse the same soapy water for a few days before dumping it out, keeping it handily close by so I can spring to action as needed!

I added the vacuum to the defense strategy last year when the leaf-footed bugs infested my tomato plants and it seemed like a more effective way to capture them, then drop them into the soapy water.

Would y’all try these methods instead of spraying pesticides in your veggie garden? If you do, tell me how it works for you!

06/04/2025

Yesterday, the hubs caught me working in my pollinator garden in a different way than the norm - laptop work! WiFi signal wasn’t the best, but the monarch butterfly fluttering about and many bees entertained me while I waited for the web to load 😅

A few plants visible in this area:
Goldenrod
Butterfly W**d
Stokesia ‘Mary Gregory’
Penstemon Smallii
Penstemon Digitalis ‘Husker Red’
Echinacea
Rudbeckia Fulgida
Aromatic Aster
Robin’s Plantain
Red Chokeberry
Common Milkw**d
Joe Pye W**d
Spicebush
… and more, all in just this one photo!

Biodiversity is critical when planting for pollinators, as different bee and butterfly species require different flower structures, bloom colors, leaves for larva, etc etc… I’ll do a whole separate post on this soon!

((Let’s just ignore the intruding Bermuda grass and various w**ds, I’ve been a busy gal!🙈))

06/02/2025

I had the BEST morning bonding with other native plant enthusiasts from at potting up 425 native plants for an upcoming giveaway celebrating pollinator week! The “Planting Party” ended with a tour of their demonstration garden - a massive area transformed from boring grass to native plantings. What an inspiration! 🤩 I’m really looking forward to growing my involvement with orgs like the NC Native Plant Society to spread the native plants and pollinator love! 💚🐝

05/23/2025

🌼 Bloom appreciation post! These are some of natives blooming in my gardens right now:

Top row:
🌱 Lanceleaf Coreopsis
🌱 Rudbeckia hirta (a nativar but I can’t remember which one 🙈)
🌱 Bee Balm (another nativar - possibly Jacob Cline?)

Middle:
🌱 Blanketflower
🌱 Passionvine
🌱 Penstemon smallii

Bottom:
🌱 Butterfly w**d
🌱Stoke’s Aster

Which flower is your favorite?? I can confirm, the bees have been loving all of these blooms 🐝💚

05/20/2025

😍 I found six monarch eggs on my common milkw**d today!!! Wondering what to look for? Read on…

I have 3 types of milkw**d in my personal gardens:
🌱 Common Milkw**d (Asclepias syriaca)
🌱 Swamp (or Rose) Milkw**d (Asclepias incarnata)
🌱 Butterfly W**d (Asclepias tuberosa)

From my observations, monarchs prefer to lay their eggs on common and swamp milkw**d. All of today’s eggs were found on common milkw**d, particularly younger, softer leaves.

The tiny yellow eggs are typically laid solitarily on the underside of the leaves, but today I found two eggs on the topside of leaves!

If you want to check your milkw**d for eggs, do so extremely gently! Very delicately examine the underside of the young leaves, particularly those towards the top of the plants.

🐛 The monarch caterpillars hatch about 4 days after being laid. Habitats are recommended to have multiple milkw**d plants because these little guys can eat and eat and eat over their 2(ish) weeks as caterpillars. To be registered as a Monarch Waystation, which my garden is, recommends at least 10 milkw**d plants of 2 or more species, all of which should be native to your region.

Stay tuned for pics once these eggs hatch into cutie caterpillars, and be sure to reach out to schedule a consultation if you want help building your own pollinator paradise!

**d **dformonarchs

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Charlotte, NC

Website

http://Www.hammmadehammgrown.com/

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