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Creating essential habitat in our community for our vital & vulnerable pollinators
October 29, 2021
Rescheduled!
2nd Annual Native Seed Exchange
Now Sunday October 31st, 2-4 pm
Photo by Del Orloske
Rescheduled
2nd Annual Native Seed Exchange
Sunday, October 31st
2 - 4 pm
Woodstock School of Art

The Woodstock Pollinator Pathway, in partnership with the Woodstock School of Art, will host The 2nd Annual Native Seed Exchange on Sunday, October 31st from
2 - 4 pm at the Woodstock School of Art.

The Native Seed Exchange is growing! Get ready to learn and get your hands dirty. This year's event will feature a sharing of native and pollinator-friendly seeds, a garden tour, a dividing and planting workshop with ecological landscape designer Del Orloske, seed ball making with Vivienne Hodges, and a Bee talk by Master Beekeeper Chris Layman.

Bring your favorite native seeds to share in small labeled paper bags or envelopes and enjoy a chance to gather with other local gardening and pollinator enthusiasts in a beautiful outdoor environment.

Masks and pre-registration are required.

To register email
woodstocknypollinatorpathway@gmail.com
Growing Wildflowers Isn’t Difficult. And It’s Urgent.
In a shifting climate, with environmental diversity at risk, it’s never been more important to propagate native plants. Here’s how.
by Margaret Roach for the New York Times, September 8, 2021

The native perennial species of our meadows — milkweeds, asters, Joe Pye weed and others — will make one more offering in fall, as if they haven’t given enough already. They will offer up their seed.

Gardeners can nurture the next generation by collecting some of it, and propagating more of their favorite wildflowers. But there’s a little wrinkle.

“Everything about sowing native seeds is counterintuitive to what people have been taught in horticulture,” said Heather McCargo, who founded the nonprofit Wild Seed Project in Maine in 2014.

Sowing wildflower seeds requires a shift in the how-to mind-set centered around the late-winter-into-spring ritual of sowing vegetables and annual flowers, she said.

That’s because wildflowers are sown at a different time: from late November to early January. They’re sown outdoors, not inside under lights. And they’re not sown one lonely seed or two per cell in six-packs, like lettuce or kale. Instead, they are sown thickly, into pots or open flats.

As Ms. McCargo put it: “Native seeds are like teenagers. They love to be together.”

Read the full article here for New York Times subscribers, or here for non-subscribers.

Eagles, Beavers, Sea Turtles: Why NYC Is Humming With Wildlife
By Lisa M. Collins for the New York Times, October 28th, 2021

Adrian Benepe has spent much of his life promoting the outdoors in New York City, from serving as a park ranger in the 1970s to becoming the parks commissioner some 30 years later. Still, he is stunned at what he has seen around town lately.

“I grew up in the parks,” said Benepe, now president of Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “There were never red-tailed hawks or Peregrine falcons or bald eagles. You didn’t even see raccoons; there were pigeons and rats and squirrels, that was it. Now there are bald eagles all over the city. This winter they were in places you haven’t seen them in generations, and they were hunting in Prospect Park.”

Raptors are the tip of the iceberg.


There have been bats and endangered butterflies, wild and rare native bees; a coyote in Central Park; beavers, salamanders and leopard frogs in Staten Island; a bobcat, mink and several foxes in the Bronx, along with endangered alewife herring and American eels traversing fish ladders in the Bronx River while hungry osprey and egrets lurk nearby; large wild oysters and tiny sea horses at piers along the Hudson River; baby damselflies, the world’s most endangered sea turtles and a baby seal in Queens; and exotic insects not seen in decades in Brooklyn.

New York City is experiencing a surprising return of native wildlife, in numbers and diversity remarkable even to local ecologists and parks officials. “You are seeing miraculous occurrences of wildlife right in the middle of the city,” Benepe said.

Read the full article here

Tell NY Officials: Toxic Neonic Pesticides Are Harming Us.
Send a message to your New York state lawmakers urging them to pass the Birds and Bees Protection Act (A7429/S699B), critical legislation that would make New York a national leader in safeguarding pollinators, waterways, people, and the future of our food supply by banning unnecessary and harmful neonic uses.

Neonics are neurotoxic insecticides used everywhere: from lawns to gardens to farm fields across the country.

These pesticides are also responsible for killing massive numbers of bees and other pollinators. We depend on pollinators to grow our food, and fewer pollinators could mean increased food prices, reduced access to healthier foods, and food scarcity that will hit low-income communities and communities of color especially hard.

Even worse, these pesticides are in the water we drink, the food we eat, and our bodies. Emerging research links exposure to neonics in the womb or early in life with developmental defects, heart deformations, muscle tremors, and memory loss.

Find out more here

In case you missed our latest virtual presentations
Use the links below to watch.

Managing Common Garden Invasives
with Dan Snider
Neonicotinoid Pesticides and Pollinators
with Dan Raichel
Nature's Best Hope
with Doug Tallamy
The DOT Method of Meadow Installation
with Del Orloske
Getting to Know Your Landscape: Site Inventory & Analysis 
with Karin Ursula Edmondson
Working with your Landscape: Planting and Care of Native Plants
with Karin Ursula Edmondosn

All of our video resources and recorded webinars are now available in one place!
Check out our YouTube channel here
Building Community Online!
We've created a Woodstock Pollinator Pathway Community Facebook group. The Woodstock Pollinator Pathway Community group was created as a way for folks who have joined the pathway or are interested in joining the pathway to communicate with each other. A way to share ideas, offer suggestions, make friends, share plants, share pictures, and offer encouragement. This is meant to be a place of positivity and information sharing for those who wish to manage their own landscapes with special attention paid to creating healthy ecosystems.

You can find the Facebook group here
Yard Signs
Don't forget to get your pollinator pathway yard sign to let everyone know you have joined the pathway!

Yard signs can be purchased online here, or you can pick one up at
Woodstock Bring Your Own, 33 Tinker Street in Woodstock!
The Map

Woodstock Pollinator Pathway Committee Member Dan Snider-Nerp of the Catskill Center recently updated and improved our map to be more inclusive of Woodstock hamlets and surrounds areas. If you have not yet added your property to the map or are unsure if you have in the past click here to be added. 

Why is the map so important?
The map shows the pollinator areas created by people who have joined the Woodstock, NY Pollinator Pathway.  We hope to have pollinator-friendly yards as close together as possible so that pollinators can fly easily from one to another.  So, encourage your neighbors to create pollinator habitat and join the pathway!
Donate
When making a donation please make note the donation is for the Pollinator Pathway.
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Join the pathway & find resources at our website
woodstocknypollinatorpathway.org
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Woodstock Pollinator Pathway · PO Box 864 · Woodstock, NY 12498-0864 · USA

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