jacobrigged
Registered: January 2021 City/Town/Province: Gardner Posts: 1
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Growing up, I always had an appreciation for nature. I especially wanted to make a difference in the environment. I once read a statistic about the Monarch Butterfly population decline and it really made me want to do something about it. I read how everyday people can help by planting different flowers so that the butterflies are attracted and have food to eat. At this time I was a Life Scout for the Boy Scouts of America and looking for an Eagle Project. So I started Project Monarch, a project to build a butterfly garden over the course of the next five months. The garden is 400 square feet of flowers at the South Greenway Park in Gardner, Ks. The flowers I used were Buddleia, Coneflower, and Milkweed. Since the time of planting them, with Boy Scout Troop 88, I have continued to maintain it. During the summer I would go with my family once or twice a week to water and pull weeds to make sure it thrives. Over time it has depended less on me and will be able to sustain on its own. It does have three layers of weed blocker, but it still ends up with some minimal weeds that need to be pulled. People have posted on social media acknowledging its benefits and commenting on the pretty flowers. During the summer, butterflies are very much abundant and the garden is beautiful. This project means a lot to me because I'm able to see the impact this garden has in my community. I know that if this project was recreated all over the United States that it would create a massive surge in butterfly populations and help the environment. I managed this project by making a detailed workbook of how it would be built and of all the materials needed. The majority of materials were donated by local businesses. The 20 bags of mulch were from Ace Hardware. The 20 plants were all donated from KAT Wholesale Outdoor. The day before the project we removed the sod. The day of the project I coordinated the construction. We started by laying weed blocker down stakes to hold it in place. Then we marked all of the spots where the plants would go. I had Scouts start on installing the metal borders while we dug all the holes. We put plant food in all of the holes before putting the flower in the ground. We then dumped 20 bags of mulch down and spread it out evenly. It even rained for us the day of the project which was a blessing. I ended up having about 20 volunteers show up so the work day went fairly quickly and took about two hours. The hardest part was disposing of the sod which was 133 cubic feet at the compost dump in Olathe, Ks. Another feature about the project is that I added a geocache to bring more people to the garden. The geocache was disguised as a rock and was fairly easy to find. The best part was being able to lead all of the younger scouts of my troop and show them all how this would positively impact the environment.
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