Many hands, big and small, planted a native garden at the Welcome to Kutztown sign on May 26 and 27.
Kutztown Thriving, part of Kutztown Community Partnership, invited the community to get their hands dirty during the two-day Planting the Triangle Garden event. The garden is located in the triangle where Greenwich Street and Constitution Blvd. split, when entering Kutztown from Route 737.
“It is absolutely a community group. It’s not a University club, it’s not the borough, it’s just whoever wants to help,” said Kutztown Thriving volunteer Dr. Robyn Underwood, a Kutztown resident and Kutztown University biology professor. “We welcome everyone.”
Kutztown resident Caecilia Holt said everyone involved is really great.
“It’s really community building and lots of people pitching in to get it done, working together,” said Holt.
Kutztown resident Lisa Schnell, who has a master’s in botany, brought her daughters Marina, 13, and Fiora, 10, to the planting event.
“It’s fun to get to work with them and the community. It’s just a great project,” said Schnell who hopes her daughters learn about being part of the community and the importance of native plants, that native plants can be really beautiful.
“Attracting pollinators I think is really important to create more habitat.”
Marina is also working on the garden as a service project, and will continue to work on the garden in the future, helping to water, for example.
“I think it’s really cool that they’re doing this. It looks a lot better out here when people come into Kutztown,” said Marina.
Kutztown resident Jake Sewall, a Kutztown Thriving volunteer and a KU environmental science faculty member, also brought his children Egan, 7, and Elena, 12, to the planting event.
“They’re involved in something that’s bigger than them,” said Sewall. His youngest wants to bake cookies and sell them to raise funds for Kutztown Thriving to buy more plants. “It’s great for them to be engaged in the community and see something bigger than just them and what they want.”
He likes that the garden is a community activity.
“Everybody’s here together. And all of a sudden this space looks nice. I never noticed it before,” said Sewall. “Hopefully we’re making a place where people can come and hang out.”
Steve Dougherty, co-chair of Kutztown Thriving, said Kutztown Thriving started as a healthy communities group. The garden is their first project.
“As our first initiative we envisioned a healthy community being beautiful as well as cohesive as far as having native plants. I think a lot of people in the group were naturally drawn to this as a first initiative because most of us are gardeners in some respect at our homes. Obviously, we wanted an initiative that made an impact and that people could see. As a fledgling group we wanted people to see tangibly what we’ve done.”
Dougherty said Kutztown Thriving has a vision for a lot of projects to build a healthy community such as local food initiatives, walk ability and bike ability.
There is a core group of six to 10 people that meet regularly and numerous volunteers involved in Kutztown Thriving. Dougherty believed there were at least 20 to 30 different people over the two-day project working on the garden.
“I think it’s something that’s very much needed in the community,” said Angela Corrado, Kutztown Thriving co-chair. “There’s always been a lot of camaraderie but not as much involvement or education. The fact that we’re beautifying and also educating is a great initiative.”
Education included handing out flyers about native plants at the Community Block Party in April and there was a native plant education class.
“There’s more behind the scenes and it can have a more lasting impact then. If we’re doing this here and educating the community, they can do it at home and tell other people, have a little ripple effect through the town.”
Corrado said Kutztown Thriving has a lot of projects down the road.
“We have a great group together who are really passionate about doing stuff so I think it’s going to be very successful,” she said.
The native garden was designed by Brook Leister, a recent Kutzown University graduate with a degree in environmental science. As her senior cap stone project, Leister researched what plants would be best and what combination of plants would be best for the pollinators, according to Jake Sewall, KU environmental science program director. She designed the layout, creating a map for the volunteers to follow. Then, she also had a chance to work on the garden with the other volunteers.
Underwood said they used natives plants that bees, birds and butterflies are familiar with.
“There’s lots of studies that show they’re absolutely more attractive to the native wildlife so we want only native plants and we tried to make it so there are flowers throughout the seasons, spring, summer and fall, so there’s food all the time,” said Underwood. “You have to get the right genus and species, pesticide free. The best thing is to have Pennsylvania genetics because they’re from Pennsylvania and they’re adapted to here which makes them really easy to care for.”
Kutztown Thriving purchased the native plants whole sale from New Moon Nurseries, North Creek, Arche Wild and Edge of the Woods.
Underwood said they would like to have a native plant sale and a native plant swap in the future.
They are currently selling native plants like the ones planted at the Triangle Garden.
“Thank you so much to everyone that helped make our first native plant pollinator garden a reality! It was a wonderful day! I hope everyone enjoys watching it grow and change,” Kutztown Thriving posted on their Facebook page afterwards.
For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/thrivingtown/.
