Spring is a great time to build a pollinator garden, and that’s just what UNT did with a pollinator-friendly gardening workshop event, co-hosted by the UNT Community Garden, UNT We Mean Green Fund department, Denton Clear Creek Natural Heritage Center and City of Denton Sustainability. The event was held at the UNT Community Garden on February 13.

Denton’s own excellent gardening resource, Rachel Weaver, led the hands-on workshop and instructed the volunteers on how to plan, plant and maintain a successful spring garden that is sure to draw pollinator friends.

“It was a great way to bring our gardeners back together as the slow winter season winds down,” said Maggie Brookshire, UNT Community Garden facilitator. “Rachel Weaver was a wealth of knowledge, and it was fun to have our workshop out in the garden where we could all get our hands dirty.”

One in three bites of food we eat is courtesy of insect pollination, and 90 percent of the world’s flowering plants depend on pollinators to reproduce, so this event was UNT’s way of helping the planet.

UNT also is a Bee Campus USA affiliate, and has a UNT BCUSA committee which serves to create educational events and programming such as this to educate the UNT community about the benefits of pollinators to our ecosystem and lives.

“The UNT Community Garden is a loved space on campus shared by many students, staff and faculty who tend to the 20 raised garden plots,” said Emily Bilcik, UNT’s We Mean Green Fund project coordinator. “The work they do out there cultivates a healthy and inviting habitat for pollinators! Thanks to the UNT student body who funded the establishment of the UNT Community Garden, anybody at UNT can get involved with the garden. We’re also open to hear ideas on how to improve UNT as a Bee Campus USA institution.”

For more information on the UNT We Mean Green Fund, visit https://studentaffairs.unt.edu/we-mean-green-fund.

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Contact: Ray Willhoft, 940-565-2464, raymond.willhoft@unt.edu