You may have to have a flexible schedule (Butterfly Garden Part 5)

The Story:  The seeds you've started in the trays have started to sprout.  Huzzah!  Some of them are being more pokey than others and you realize that if you were to wait for more plants to germinate, the early risers would be wilted and smothered by waiting too long in those tiny pods.  Good thing you're flexible and don't mind having two different sprout-planting sessions, which wind up being about three weeks apart.  Even with two sessions, there is still about a whole tray's worth of pods that never grew anything.  In fact, some of them even started to mold, sitting in the miniature greenhouses that those starter trays are.  Eventually you just had to face the fact that seeds are so numerous because there is a built-in mortality rate, and dump the dead pods.

Another thing you have to be flexible about is the idea of a neat-looking, organized garden.  The idea of having all these lovely little native plants growing up in clearly-labeled sections with pretty hand-painted stones identifying which plants are which is so far from reality that you're laughing at the past you that had the naiveté to think that was even a possibility when children were involved.  Kids planted whatever pods they wanted, wherever they wanted, regardless of your suggestions and instructions to plant the ones from this tray here and that tray there.  The trays being what you thought they were in the first place was a bit of a gamble because of how the seed-starting session went (that story is here), so it makes sense that the actual planting would be equally disorganized.  And the painted stones actually being next to the plants they're labelled for?  Forget about it!

The Lesson:  Nature is chaos.  Embrace it.  In the wild, native plants can grow in bunches of the same variety, but they just as frequently grow in heterogeneous communities that look like they were haphazardly thrown there by a bunch of five-year-olds, and this actually creates the biodiversity and balance that all ecosystems need to survive.  So, when a bunch of children haphazardly plant your carefully selected native plant species here, there, and everywhere, they're just being true to nature.  You may have to rethink what you consider a success, and that the purpose of the butterfly garden is to provide a habitat for endangered monarchs and food for other native pollinators, not to look like it was clipped from a magazine.   "Clean" gardens that are more mulch than leaf, gardens that don't have plants growing up around each other, gardens that don't use as much of the space as possible to support plant life, are gardens that don't really contribute anything to the environment.  If you're going to spend the time to teach kids about native plants and build a garden at your library, you want that project to pull its weight.

The Resources:  Get some cheap hand trowels from your local hardware store and have some gardening gloves on hand.  Most of my kids didn't want them, because who doesn't expect dirt on their hands when they're planting?  But, it's good to have some for the kids and adults that do want to use them.  I brought in extras from home and borrowed some tools from gardening friends as well, because nobody wants to pay for dozens of tools that you're only going to use once or twice a year.

You may find that aprons are just not enough (Butterfly Garden Part 4)

The Story:  Things get a little messy and disorganized at our second meeting, where we planted the stratified seeds from the first meeting in starter pods to help them germinate.  We also painted garden stones to identify what each plant is once they're in the ground.  The names of each plant were written on the bags they were stratified in, and I only put one bag per table, and one seed starter pallet per table, in the hopes that they would maybe kind of stay together, but they didn't.  Some kids put seeds in the plant pods faster than others, and went over to help other kids.  Some seed bags had more seeds than others, some kids wanted to paint more stones than others, some people took seeds from other tables, and some kids took seeds that weren't stratified from the bags of wildflower seed mixes which were on the cart for the after-project (making more take-home planters for those that finished with the seeds and the stones faster than others).  Once seed pod trays were full, they went to the window ledge where I tried to write names on the lids of the trays in a timely manner, but sometimes people just put them on the windows without telling me (I was frequently busy assisting/supervising) and I had to guess which plants were in there later.  It was all rather chaotic.  After the program, I had to find room in staff areas of the building with wide enough window ledges to support all the trays (7 total).  I knew that leaving them unattended in publicly accessible areas of the building would prove disastrous.  So for at least a month, everyone's office and break room was graced with the presence of (sometimes) sprouting plants.  They were all pretty good sports about it, thankfully.

The Lesson:  Be prepared to be messy.  We had aprons for the patrons, but that did not contain the amount of mess to be cleaned up afterwards.  Paper was put down on tables to keep them from being painted, but water was necessary to start the pods, and of course some people managed to spill almost whole pitchers of water on the table, making the paper's paint-catching qualities non-existent.  Thankfully acrylic paint washes off pretty easily, I made sure I had extra time to clean up, and I wore clothing I didn't care about.  I don't think I can reiterate enough on this blog how messy being a librarian is.  They don't tell you about this part of the job in library school, so consider yourself warned.

The Resources:  I already had paints and brushes, and I bought large river rocks at a craft store for the painted garden stones.  I felt it was better to do this in person rather than online, so I could pick the bags that had the best sizes and shapes of rocks for painting (smooth, semi-flat, palm-sized or bigger).  I used this seed pod starter, but got it from the local hardware store.

If you thought this was the end of the story, you can think again.  So keep your eyes peeled for more butterfly garden silliness.

You may have an urgent need to become the resident botany expert (Butterfly Garden Part 3)

The Story:  You find all these great butterfly garden seed mixes and kits online, so you order a bulk native seed kit/mix from a native gardening site, but when it comes in, you realize that many of the seeds are pre-mixed.  When it listed which species there were, it didn't mean they'd come separated out.  This throws off your whole game, because you had super-cool plans to have the kids learn to identify different plants and make garden markers and all sorts of stuff to inform visitors to the garden about what was growing there.  So, you put this aside, and use it for a completely different tween program, still with tons left over.  Then, you go back to the native seeds site, and order individual packets of most of the plants in the seed mix, substituting other ones that you've determined through way too much online research into monarch butterflies to be the best species of milkweed for your soon-to-be habitat.  You discover, however, upon further investigation, that your timeline will have to be pushed back a bit, because despite all the hubub about planting seeds in spring, this is not how most native wildflowers operate.  They need to experience winter in order to sprout in the spring.  So, you have to trick the plant seeds into germinating through a process called cold stratification.  Basically, you put the seeds on a damp paper towel, put that into a ziplock bag, and put them in the refrigerator for several weeks.  As you look more and more into it, you are dismayed to learn that most seeds require multiple months in the fridge.  Well, to heck with that; you don't have that kind of time.  You decide to put them in for one month, maximum, and let nature handle the rest.

You run your program, the kids and their respective parents and grandparents help them prepare the seeds for cold stratification.  You explain the science behind it, teach the kids some new big words, and since you know this won't take the whole hour, or at least you hope you'll have enough people there that it won't, and you want to give them something to take home, you plan a craft project.  Using newspaper, masking tape (because it's biodegradable, as you've just recently learned), and a mason jar as a mold, you teach the kids to craft their own plantable, biodegradable starter pots.  They love these, make multiples, and fill them with soil and seeds from your earlier botanical botch-up.  Win-win.  Though you still have a ton of leftover wildflower/native grass seed mix.

The Lesson:  It pays to do your research on many levels, and it also pays to be flexible and to have a boss who doesn't ask too many questions about how much money you're spending on seeds.  Even if you've done a thing at home for a while as a hobby, changing any bit of it to bring it in to your library for a program is going to throw you out of your comfort zone.  I'd been native gardening in my yard for a couple years now and thought I had a handle on the situation.  I'd mostly bought already-grown plants from nurseries in the spring, and seeds that I bought in the spring and threw in the ground in my garden sprouted anyway (or some of them, at least).  But when I wanted to ensure a bigger success rate for the library garden for the patrons, I realized how much extra work it would be.  However, everything is a learning opportunity, for both yourself and your patrons, and without knowing about my seed-buying mishap, all the kids really enjoyed participating in all this preparatory activity, and the adults came up to me after and said how great it was that their kids are seeing plants from the very beginning and how even though they themselves had been gardening for years at home, they didn't know about cold stratification and they congratulated me on being able to teach them something new.

The resources:  I bought my seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery.  They have lots of different kinds of milkweed, and each plant has a range map so you can figure out if it is native to your area, as despite what many "wildflower mix" seed packets will tell you, there are very few plants that actually belong on the whole continent, and to make your garden serve a purpose for butterflies or other wildlife, it's best to plant something they can actually use.

I figured out the minimum amount of time I could simulate seed hibernation online from a variety of sources, but here are some of the best places to read about how to properly start and grow milkweed:
Monarch Butterfly Garden
American Meadows
Prairie Moon.

I got my directions for a biodegradable planter here, but there are tons of other options out there on the mommy blogs, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and post all about it here.  Just find one that works for your own purposes and run with it.

Fear not, for there is more nonsense to come in the garden saga.

You may have to get your hands dirty...very dirty (Butterfly GardenPart 2)

The Story:  After removing all that gravel, you discover that underneath, from years of heavy gravel and rainwater unabsorbed by plants, there is a hard clay-dust-rock-like substance that is in no way arable land.  Much like a martian landscape, your garden area is barren and incapable of supporting life.  So, off to the local hardware store you go, after measuring the garden and calculating how many square feet of soil you're going to need to buy.  You schedule a delivery of what should be more than enough soil, and when it gets there (three days after the scheduled delivery date), it sits on the sidewalk next to the garden while it rains for a week.  Meanwhile, your actual planting date is looming ever closer, because before you actually dug out the garden space, you've been hosting programs where the children helped prepare the plants (more on that in another post).  And now they're sprouting.

Finally, you get a nice enough day to get out there with a shovel and a garden rake, you put the dirt down, and discover you're still, somehow, a little bit short.  Back to the hardware store for another delivery.  This eventually comes and you cover up the rest of the barren garden bed, just in time for the first sprout planting program with the kids.

The Lesson & Resources:  Be prepared to get your hands seriously dirty and muddy, and bring clothing and shoes you don't care about to change into before you start dumping dirt.  You may wind up doing most of this part yourself due to scheduling, weather, etc.  Allow more time and more resources than you think you actually need, and then allow for more.  You'll always be over-budget and barely on time.  You will, however, eventually end up with a plantable garden, and kids who are excited to do the planting.

Stay tuned for more misadventures in planning a library butterfly garden.

You may have to shovel gravel for multiple hours (Butterfly Garden Part 1)

The Story:  Spring is coming, and you decide it would be a great learning experience for the children to raise butterflies at the library.  Then, you think how great it would be for them to do some good for the planet and build a butterfly garden.  You have the perfect spot in mind:  plenty of sun, nothing growing there now, and it even gets some visibility as people drive by on their way to the book drop.  The only problem is that it is covered in gravel at least three inches thick, on top of a weed barrier cloth, on top of hard-packed clay.  You don't know any of this yet.

Here is the before picture:

So you enlist the help of the custodian, who is the only person on staff accustomed to physical labor, as you know nobody else will volunteer for this task, and you start shoveling.  Of course you have to talk to the boss to get off-desk time for the project and permission to wear ratty jeans while you're working.  Ever try to garden in business casual?  I don't recommend it.

You think this will take a couple of hours.  When you estimated this for the boss, you didn't take into account how dense this gravel was, and you didn't realize how deep it was either.  There's also the task of redistributing the gravel to other beds once you've removed it from this one.  Two or three hours is not enough.

I can't tell you how many hours we spent in total, but it was a lot.  It took multiple sessions of a couple or more hours at a time to get the appropriate amount of gravel cleared away.  I was sore for a day or two after each time, but it was the good soreness that can only come from knowing you've worked physically hard and accomplished something.

The Lesson:  It will always take longer than you think it will.  A bin full of gravel takes two people to lift.  The weather will not cooperate with your availability schedule.  There will be problems that you did not foresee, and you will just have to deal with them.  You've already started this garden project, and it's too late to back out now.

The Resources:  Hopefully you have a few good, sturdy shovels on hand for digging.  In the absence of a wheelbarrow, a low, flat book cart with plastic bins on them makes a good gravel transport.  Having deodorant in your work locker is something you'll be grateful that you already do after a day of shoveling gravel when you have to get presentable again for your shift at the desk.

Stay tuned for more mishaps and adventures in creating a library butterfly garden from scratch.