Butterfly Garden

A project that I spent a lot of time on would have to be my Bronze Award for Girl Scouts. There are 3 different "prestigious" awards girls can  accomplish in Scouting. First, the Bronze Award for Junior Girl Scouts. (4-5th Grade). Second the Silver Award for Cadette Girl Scouts (6-8th Grade) and finally the Gold Award for Senior and Ambassador Girl Scouts (9-12 Grade). I was in 5th grade when I first started my Bronze Award project. There are MANY guidelines and regulations to meet while completing these awards. Such as how many hours a person/troop has to contribute and if a person has to work independently inside or outside of Girl Scouts. I worked within my troop, which means we all completed the award together. We decided that we would make a butterfly garden at Camp Timberlane, our "home" Girl Scout camp in Wakeman. Although there were other Troops also using the garden as a Bronze Award, there was A LOT of hard work to do. First we cleared out the area that camp told us we could put the garden at. Then we had to spread out giant mounds of soil and mulch that the grounds keeper, Ed, dumped there for us. At the time the piles were taller than I was. After spreading all of the dirt out,  Ed took my troop out to a local field that was over grown with wild flowers. We got to choose what type of flowers we wanted to put in the garden. A very close Girl Scout friend, Sunny, helped us chose what flowers attracted more butterflies. Then we got planting! My troop had a fairly large section of the garden to work with, so the whole project took months to complete, but it paid off once it was done. At the end of it all the garden was beautiful. We made stepping stones with all of our names and Troop number to line the paths in the garden. Finally we had a large ceremony with our families so they could see us be pinned with our Bronze Awards. I am very proud of all the hard work I put into the garden, although now it is overgrown and filled with weeds... I plan to go back this summer and help put life back in the garden again.