Image by Hartmut Wisch.
Welcome to Pollinator Week! Here at the Great Sunflower Project, we are busy counting everything from bees to hummingbirds on the plants in our garden. We also are delighted to announce that our Garden habitat assessment form is now open for use! We heard from all of you that you needed a tool to see what you could do to improve habitat in your gardens, parks and other green spaces. This tool is designed to give you some ideas! We set up a scoring system and we hope you can try to improve your garden at least 10 points a year and eventually reach our Great Pollinator Habitat score of 210! You can re-take it each spring to track how your garden has improved!
We'd also like you to think about taking this a step further and accepting the Great Pollinator Habitat Challenge!
Imagine what would happen if every home, school, playground, senior center and park around the world, took one day each year to evaluate and improve the pollinator habitat at their site. Together, we could easily create hundreds of thousands of patches of pollinator friendly habitat.
Our Great Pollinator Habitat Challenge just takes three steps:
Evaluate: Take the Garden habitat assessment and make a plan to improve your pollinator habitat.
Act.:Take action on your plan and create better habitat.
Share. Take a child or school group for a walk in the garden; have them interview you about pollinator habitat. Find a pollinator gardening or pollinator expert and invite him/her to lead an outing. Photograph or draw as many pollinators as possible, id them using discover life’s keys or our pollinator guide. Learn to identify 5 new pollinators. Recruit an artist to create a film, mural, or mosaic to celebrate people’s connections with pollinators, to build a new water element for the garden or to jury an exhibition of children’s drawings of pollinators at the local library. Hold a concert in the garden celebrating the sounds of nature. Find a local senior center, school garden or public garden and do a pollinator habitat assessment and help them develop a plan for implementing improvements the following year.
Let us know what you do! We'd love to see pictures.
Happy Pollinator Week!
Gretchen
The Queen Bee