Community gardening in the heart of downtown Minneapolis
Million Pollinator Garden Challenge
Did you know that our very own community garden is registered as an official Pollinator Garden?!?!?
As of 2021, Gethsemane Community Garden has joined the over 1 MILLION registered gardens across the nation that are intentionally creating gardens that promote pollinators!
Over the past few years, our gardeners have begun planting specifically to attract pollinators – animals responsible for carrying pollen on their bodies which transfers genetic material critical to the reproductive system of most flowering plants. By doing a few simple things like including more flowers, and a few water sources, GCG has now qualified as a pollinator garden site. And it looks great too!
So why is this important? Well, here are a few pollinator facts that might blow your mind!
Somewhere between 75% and 95% [1] of all flowering plants on the earth need help with pollination – they need pollinators. Pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1200 crops. That means that 1 out of every three bites of food you eat is there because of pollinators [2, 3]. If we want to talk dollars and cents, pollinators add 217 billion dollars to the global economy [4,5], and honey bees alone are responsible for between 1.2 and 5.4 billion dollars in agricultural productivity in the United States [6]. In addition to the food that we eat, pollinators support healthy ecosystems that clean the air, stabilize soils, protect from severe weather, and support other wildlife [7].
https://www.pollinator.org/pollinators
So if you think you have seen an increase in the number of bees, butterflies, and even the occasional hummingbird… you’re right. Nice job GCG Gardeners!!!
To learn more, here are a few resources: