Growing a Pollinator Garden from the Ground Up
Juli Bokenkamp and 30 families had worked on the Meridian Co-op Garden for eight years when the city of Meridian—which owns the land, next to Julius M. Kleiner Memorial Park—asked them a question: Did they want an additional, oddly shaped 2,000-square-foot parcel that already had mature trees and an irrigation box?
They did, and this spring the Kleiner Park Pollinator Garden Project was born.
The group—which had already planted flowers in its community garden to attract pollinators—quickly collected a variety of grants ranging from compost and rocks from the city of Meridian to $2,979 from the Idaho Botanical Garden Lunaria Grant Program to $500 in cookie money from Meridian Girl Scout Troop #232.
They were new to pollinating, but worked to ensure that the garden would have purple, pink, red, orange, white and yellow flowers blooming at the same time to attract some of the 400 varieties of bees —as well as butterflies, moths and hummingbirds—that act as pollinators in the Treasure Valley.
“When it comes to pollinators, it’s important to plant native habitat,” says Bokenkamp, president of the group. “People think pollinators means honeybees, but native plants require special pollinators.”
Once all the plants were collected, it took the 30 families just two or three hours to plant them all. In future years, Bokenkamp hopes the plants will fill in naturally around the logs and other features intended to make the pollinators feel at home.
In addition, the group also hopes to add concrete bowls to collect water, signs to identify the plants and a drip watering system to replace the overhead watering system that currently batters the flowers and pollinators, as well as find an artist to decorate the irrigation box. One family has already painted a batch of rocks to look like ladybugs.
The pollinator garden sees a lot of six-legged visitors, which has also attracted two-legged ones who take pictures to try to identify the six-legged ones they don’t recognize.
“This is new to all of us,” Bokenkamp said. “We want this to be a place of education.”
Meridian Co-op | @boisecoop
Julius M. Kleiner Memorial Park
Kleiner Park Pollinator Garden Project
