It's a big step. The Gold Award is the highest achievement in Girl Scouts. Girls need to research a problem, come up with a plan, present it to the appropriate authorities and then implement the plan. They have to work a minimum of eighty hours on their Gold Award project.
I'd like to say that the brunette twin has been planning to earn her Gold Award for a while, but that would not be true. The reality is she wants to complete the award cycle, having already earned her Bronze and Silver Awards. She knows having a Gold Award will bolster her college applications. And, it is something she can do on her own time and at her own pace.
She decided to create a pollinator garden. She had been talking about the bee colony collapse in school for a while now. We have a large pollinator garden in our backyard. We have seen how specific plants really do attract butterflies, bees and dragon flies.
Our church has a large, unkempt quarter acre everyone always calls "the forest." It's a neglected space with a lot of potential. We talked to the church vestry about the idea and they liked it. The brunette twin put together a formal proposal and it was approved.
Now we just have to clean up the area, put down a mulch base, research pollinator plants, source the plants and design a garden. I guess I know what we're doing this spring, summer and fall.
