The Girl Scouts are Bethpage State Park's "Busy Bees" this Fall Season

Did you know that fall is the season for seed collecting? Did you know that between our multiple planted gardens and wildflowers, Bethpage State Park is nothing short of a seed bank!?

In fact, our staff spends a significant amount of time in September and October collecting seeds from favorited pollinator plants, with the goal of propagating new plants for the following season. That's right, it is never too soon to be thinking about creating a habitat for next year's pollinators!  

This year we wanted to share our plant knowledge with the local community by inviting two Girl Scout troops down to our Picnic area to partake in a fun seed activity! 

The project - SEED BOMBS! 

Seed bombs are an easy and creative way to promote seed dispersal. All you need is soil, compost, clay and your choice of seeds. Fun fact: Since we are a park with golf course materials, we actually used wet hydroseeding mulch instead of clay. It worked just as well to bond the materials together.

 Once the seed bombs are made, all you need to do is wait for them to dry. They can then be thrown practically anywhere there is dirt and empty space. 

The types of seeds we chose for the Girl Scouts were two varities of Milkweed seeds: Common Milkweed and Butterflyweed. Both are in the Asclepias family and are critical to the life cycle of Monarch Butterflies. Milkweed plants provide forage but also habitat for female Monarchs to oviposit their eggs.

It brought Bethpage State Park staff great joy to share our seeds with the Scouts and to teach them all about Milkweed in the process.

Afterwards we took The Troops out to our Picnic Pollinator Garden to give them a good idea of what could be when you create a habitat for pollinators. Yael, the Park Ecologist, provided them with a print out list of the flowers currently in bloom. She also gave The Troops a quick educational tour. The best part of the tour was when The Scouts got a kick out of seeing their donated bee homes (from last year) being used by Mason Bees.

All in all, it was a wonderful event where our park got to share resources and information with young and passionate future gardeners. They learned that all it takes is a few seeds (or seed bombs) to start something beautiful! Fun was had and more importantly, The Scouts were able to bring what they learned to create a garden back at home.

 

As the great Audrey Hepburn once said, 

" To plant a garden, is to believe in tomorrow".