All Summer Butterflies

Our Bronx Children are very excited over the possibility of meeting Mr. Monarch and Miss Painted Lady in creating their very first Butterfly Garden. The Butterfly Garden will help the children learn firsthand about these lovely creatures evolves and how they will help to bring beauty to Haffen Park in the Bronx.

I recently attended the workshop on how to create a Butterfly garden and I will share this information on how to attract butterflies to enhance the visitor's trip to the park. We will conduct training with the volunteers for a few hours, we will bring in pictures of the butterflies that are known to be in New York State and will attempt to educate the volunteers about the habitat of the butterflies. We will learn more about the wild flowers that can be used to attract butterflies and bees. We will introduce the volunteers to the Queen's Anne Lace, a wild flower which the butterflies love as well as the milkweed, which the Monarch uses to lay its eggs. This will help us keep a permanent family of butterflies in our garden. Also learn about fertilizers and how to enrich the soil for the plants. And how to use the tools to turn over the ground to make it ready for the garden. 

The butterfly garden can be started and completed in two weeks. And volunteers should not have to spend more than five days working to get the garden ready. We only anticipate slight difficulty in purchasing some of the plants that butterflies are known to love for their bright colors and the nectar that the plant produces.

The Friends of Haffen Park volunteer group will address the concern that we have for the lack of butterflies, bees, and other helpful insects that are not visible in the park. Because there are very few plants that bloom that produce nectar in the park, the visitors do not have the opportunity to see the many species of butterflies that exist. Also, we do not have any flowers in the park in which bees, f assorted species, are able to flirt and pollinate flowers. This is mainly because this area is very urban and there is construction going on at all times and the shrubbery and wild plants that may have attracted plants years ago are all being replaced by new houses with concrete for their front yard.

There are quite a few visitors to the park in our volunteer program that have never had the joy of see a beautiful monarch or painted lady butterfly flirting from plant to plant, sipping nectar. Also they often are not able to identify a honey bee from a bumble bee, etc. We want to restore the balance of nature by creating a butterfly garden in the park.

We will create a butterfly garden that be 10x15 feet on a sunny slope in the park, and we will have our volunteers learn about the plants that butterflies thrive on as well as identify the names of the plants. Some of the plants will be annuals and other perennials.