Submitted By Michelle Isaacson, Southern YES! Coordinator
On Tuesday, June 6, 2017 the Sleepy Eye teams gathered along with city officials, media, and partners to celebrate the teams and receive the Spring Judging Awards.
After light refreshments the teams got right to work. The local golf course has designated 2 areas that will become pollinator habitat and the teams worked hard digging holes and planting native plants in those areas. There is also room for expansion so the teams have the potential to plant in over an acre of land! Over the summer, members will take care of the area by watering and physically taking out weeds. The goal is to make these areas chemical free so signs will be posted to inform workers.
Phase two of the pollinator project also happened this day as volunteers installed native bee homes in the golf course trees. The newly planted flowers and the new homes will make for great native pollinator habitat, helping to increase their dwindling populations. Students learned a little about why it is important to provide suitable homes for pollinators and how many native bees are solitary and nest differently than the very social honeybees.
Phase three includes education. Signs will be placed around the plantings to educate golfers on the project and why it is so important. Students will also do outreach to further educate their community on pollinator habitat.
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by— offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
Rachel Carson
