The Insect / Butterfly Garden

One of the Inquiry Teams in Team Endeavour has decided to work on making a Butterfly/Insect Garden.  The people in the team are:  Liam, Māhora, Harriet, Freya, Quaid and Jess.

First we went to see the space available for the garden.

Next we researched what plants would attract the most beneficial insects and butterflies to the garden. We wrote them on a plan and highlighted the plants that attracted the greatest range of insects.  

Brief:

1.  We needed to attract a wide range of beneficial insects and provide food for them

2.  Provide an area monarch coccoons could hang from

3.  Provide a hot sunny area for butterfly wing drying

4.  Provide a sandy wet area for insects to drink from

5.  Build an insect hotel for other insects to live in

We developed the start of a plan for the garden and researched ideas on insect hotels.  We shared these ideas with both Zanada and Terry, who are helping us with the project.  Terry talked to us about the importance of bees and how we could cake the garden for them too.

At the garden, we started to build the tepee for catepillar cocoons but it seemed quite big.  Zanada decided to make the garden 50% bigger than we had intended.  Craig said he could help us by building edging for the path so the bark wouldn't get spread around.

We needed to remove the weeds from the surrounding garden so that we could use it to extend the garden.  Our next step is to mark out the path and plant the first of the plants we have bought:

3 x lavender

1x green fennel

1x bronze fennel

1x dill

3x swan plants (These will need to wait till after the frosts finish.)

We have planted seeds for parsley, chives, corriander and lots of swan plants from the seed pod we cut open.