Girl Scout revitalizes The Gentle Barn garden
Spring — the season of warmer weather, flowers blooming and butterflies emerging. In the spirit of spring, through The Gentle Barn, Canyon High School senior Alexis Reeves, 17, is working on her Girl Scouts Gold Award Project by creating a food and butterfly garden.
According to the Girl Scouts website, the award is designed to help inspire change in the community, where Girl Scouts use “everything they’ve learned as a Girl Scout to help fix a problem in their community or make a lasting change in their world.”
“I’m working with The Gentle Barn to refurbish the garden area because since the pandemic, it has been neglected and it’s not really growing anything right now. I’m going to be working to help re-implement a garden so they could get more props for the springtime, and it’s going to be a public garden,” Reeves said.
Reeves hopes to not only recreate a garden that grows vegetables for the animals to eat, but also to also create awareness for the environment and sustainable practices, including a garden for bees to pollinate.
“The hardest part is the manual labor and working out details for the project; it took me months to figure out what I wanted to do for my project and had to have meetings with founders of The Gentle Barn,” Reeves said.
Needing to use more traditional ways of fundraising, Reeves has also tackled the challenge of raising funds for her project.
“The Girl Scout Council is very picky with fundraising because they want you to put as much effort in your project as possible,” Reeves said. “We’re going to do a garage sale and we’ve been collecting bottles and cans from our neighborhood to help raise money for this project.”
Wanting to also install a drip irrigation system in addition to the planter beds, Reeves has relied on donations from individuals and businesses, as well, to help bring her eco-friendly project to life.
“[We’re installing] an automatic timer for watering the plants so no one has to do any manual labor on it every single day,” Reeves said.
Reeves is expected to have her project finished by the beginning of June.