On Wednesday, Ed Toth, co-founder and partner in the Great Pollinator Project, and I found our way – after some wrong turns – down a service road into the northeast corner of Van Cortlandt Park where one of the project’s Bee Watcher gardens is located. Ed is Director of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island – part of the NYC Parks Department. We were in a parks vehicle loaded with Great Pollinator Project target plants to add to the Bee Watcher garden that was planted there last year. The location is in the midst of greenhouses and a nursery yard that grows garden plants for parks throughout the City. There we met Kevin Matteson, project collaborator, and Nell Roberts, a Fordham student who works with him.
The Bee watcher garden was looking good – even ripe strawberries! But there were plenty of weeds to pull. We cleared some space to plant some native sunflowers and garden cosmos.
From there, Kevin and Nell set off for the Bee Watcher garden in Pelham Bay Park. Kevin’s compact car was almost bursting with plants! Ed and I were off to Soundview Park where Ed said he didn’t know what to expect, but that he’d heard the plot had been mowed. We were pleasantly surprised to see a thriving – though very weedy! – Bee Watcher garden when we entered the park along the Bronx River Greenway from O’Brien Avenue. We had our work cut out for us pulling mugwort, grasses, clover – and even a scooter! Now the garden has freshly planted sunflowers and cosmos in addition to the stands of milkweed, mountain mint, and goldenrod that are going strong and will be in flower later in the season.
Ed Toth surveys the weedy scene at Soundview Park.
Weeded, planted, and ready for Bee Watchers!
Some of you are already “mobile” Bee Watchers, exploring new places around the city to observe bees. The Bee Watcher gardens in the Bronx are just three of the 18 project gardens throughout the five boroughs. These sites are especially important to us because we have no bee visitation data from these far-flung corners of the City. Visit http://greatpollinatorproject.org/other.html for more information and then plan a visit! Or if you happen to live near one of these gardens, perhaps you’ll make it a regular destination. And don’t forget to look for bees along the way.
Check out the Bee Watcher gardens around the city! You’ll find the project target flowers there and it will give us those valuable data points where we need them.
Look for this tag at Bee Watcher gardens.