There is color and even Monarchs and bees buzzing in our Neighborhood Park Project!
Earlier this spring I posted about a neighborhood association project I got involved with. We have three neighborhood parks and had received a grant to beautify our neighborhood. The decision to develop three pollinator garden beds was achievable using native plants and was the goal. I volunteered to get involved and ended up responsible for selecting and obtaining 150+ native plants for the project plus taking the responsibility of planting one of the beds and maintaining it for this year. Thanks to a few gardener friends we've done this supporting the crew of volunteers that prepared the beds for us! We've had to haul water to them weekly but created a water barrel system that has been filled by a volunteer each week, which made less work for us! So we only had to take along empty sprinkling cans to take care of the watering tasks!
After three to four months we are seeing the fruits of our labor and investment in passion. Lots of color and even some Monarch Butterflies and bees are showing up! The plants, which were primarily first year starts purchased from area growers, have taken root and settled in. Weeding has been minimal thanks to the donation of mulch from our city park department! It will take three years for these plants to reach maturity but they are well on their way and being enjoyed by neighbors. I am anxious to see what growth we have next year!
A week ago I took on the task of supplying stakes with labels for each group of plant varieties in the beds. The labels included a common name plus the botanical name.
The bed in Judd Park (which I worked with) is in part shade so this enabled me to use some different plants than the other beds in part of it. I plan to add a few spring bulbs this fall yet and get some bluebells started next spring!
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