On Tuesday, July 9th, three dedicated members of the Rotary Club of Bedford—Christine Pinney, Marc Hamilton, and Paula Gilarde—gathered for the first service project of the 2025–2026 Rotary year: a work day at the Native Pollinator Preservation Garden.
The team focused on identifying and removing invasive weeds to help native species thrive. Their efforts support a healthier ecosystem and demonstrate the club’s ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship.
Well, here we are, Spring 2025. Is gardening all about weeds? Seems like it. If you had told me we would still have a pollinator garden, I would have told you you're nuts. But here we are, a few years after we did the initial planting, weeding! Our fearless lead gardener (Paula) has us weeding the healthy remaining plants and in general, sprucing up the whole pollinator garden. Under Paula’s very capable leadership weeds were flying, wood chips and more cardboard boxes were ripped apart, all tape removed (that was my assigned job – Yea Bob) spread out on the ground making the overall garden wider (we added a path between the actual pollinator garden and the weeds), and then covering the whole place with more woodchips graciously provided by Public Works,
Friday morning (July 28th) a band of weed warriors took to the pollinator garden to clean up the area and to remove any plants that were growing where they weren't supposed to be. Weeding is pretty straightforward as we have flags placed wherever a plant is supposed to be. This handy method allowed even the most novice gardeners to feel confident in what they were doing!
Despite the rain, we held a successful Rotary Day of Service on Saturday (May 18th) at our native pollinator preservation garden in Page Field. The hardy group that came out helped weed (and there were lots!) and mulch the area. 
We are delighted to announce that the Bedford Cultural Council approved funding for Plant Labels for the Rotary Native Pollination Preservation Garden! The goals of the garden are to increase native pollinator habitat, and to educate the public about the importance of native pollination systems. Labeling the plants in a clear, legible, water-proof way will help people learn what plants are being used in the garden. Plants will be labeled with their common name and their latin names. Hopefully this will encourage more people to grow their own native plants. There will be another update in the spring when the ground thaws enough to put the markers in the ground! 
Finally, the fruits of our winter sow made it into the ground. We first spent some time weeding the area we had prepared last fall. Then, on 9/30, we set up a grid using wood, inspired by a trip to the Chelmsford Pollination Preservation Garden. Each plant species was planted in a 3'x3' square, although we expanded the area for some plants so we could have even more - those plants were in 3'x6' rectangles. 
Join us as we work on our Native Pollination Preservation Garden! There will be two work days in September. The first one will be weeding around the area, and preparing to plant. It will be on Friday, September 17th at 1pm. This was rescheduled due to an impending storm! Sign up to help out here. 
On February 25th, 16 of us gathered in Bob Cassidy's garage fr a winter sow for our Pollinator Garden. Great! So what is a winter sow anyway? Here is what Webster has to say about it. Winter sowing is an outdoor method of starting seeds and it requires plastic containers like milk or juice cartons), soil, seeds and Mother Nature. By growing your own plants from seeds, you can several hundreds of dollars each each year. 
Our first order of business was to prepare the garden bed. The DPW mowed the area close to the ground and provided wood chips for our use. We had planned on starting work on Saturday, but the remnants of Hurricane Ian pushed our work into Monday afternoon. We smothered the entire area with cardboard and covered the cardboard with woodchips. This is a way of killing weeds without using chemicals. The cardboard will remain on the ground until next fall (or towards the end of the summer) in order to effectively kill weeds. 
