PRESS RELEASE – For immediate release 5/15/25

Sustainable Saratoga Hosts Pollinator Palooza Native Plant Sale Event on Saturday, May 31st, 2025

Media Contact: Beth Plummer; beth@sustainablesaratoga.org

Saratoga Springs, NY – Pollinator Palooza is Back! Join Sustainable Saratoga on Saturday, May 31st from 10am-3pm to buy native plants and meet people dedicated to protecting our precious pollinators, their habitat, and other natural resources.

Pollinator Palooza offers a wonderful array of native flowering perennials that attract pollinators as sources of nutrition, and homeowners will love the colors, fragrances, and beauty these natives bring to yards and gardens. Sustainable Saratoga volunteers have been growing 1,600 plants for the last 2 months and they are ready for their new homes.

Dianna Goodwin, Pollinator Committee chair for Sustainable Saratoga says, “Every garden, no matter how small, has an important role to play in protecting pollinators. Planting native plants is an essential part of creating food and habitat for our native pollinators. However, finding native plants can often be a challenge. The Pollinator Palooza native plant sale offers a variety of plants to gardeners in the local area.”

EVENT DETAILS:

• When: Saturday, May 31st, 10am-3pm
• Where: Oligny’s Country Gardens, 390 Wilton-Gansevoort Rd, Gansevoort
• Parking: Across the street at 393 Wilton-Gansevoort Rd.
• Pet policy: While we love our four-legged friends, we kindly ask that you leave your pups at home. No pets at the event, please.
• Payment by cash or check preferred

This family-friendly event includes

• Over 30 varieties of native plants for sale
• Information about native plants and pollinators
• Free soil pH testing by Cornell Cooperative Extension (bring about 1/4 cup of dry soil)
• Help with your gardening questions
• Local organizations focused on native plants and ecosystems
• Kids’ activities
• Raffles to win books, gift certificates, plants, and more
• Food Trucks

New this year, give the gift of native plants to someone you love by buying a Pollinator Palooza e-gift card prior to the event. Electronic gift cards are now available on the Sustainable Saratoga website for purchase. Good for purchase of plants in the Sustainable Saratoga greenhouse or for raffle tickets. BUY YOURS HERE.

For more information on the Pollinator Palooza native plan sale, visit:

https://sustainablesaratoga.org/projects/pollinators-and-native-plants/pollinator-palooza-native-plant-sale/

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ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION
Sustainable Saratoga is a not-for-profit organization that promotes sustainable practices and the
protection of natural resources, through education, advocacy and action, for the benefit of current
and future generations in the Saratoga Springs area. Since 2008, Sustainable Saratoga has been a
leader in promoting awareness of environmental issues and what we as a local community can do
to minimize our ecological impact while maintaining a high quality of life.

Video produced by David Washburn and Kelsey Trudell

Sustainable Saratoga is delighted that so many people turned out for the Third Annual Pollinator Palooza at Oligny’s Country Gardens on June 1, 2024. We are proud to announce that over 2,000 native pollinator plants were purchased and found their way into the hands and gardens of Capital District and North Country residents. This is terrific support for pollinators and Sustainable Saratoga! Thank you!

The Palooza’s success was owed to the volunteerism and generosity of many individuals including the Oligny family and Sustainable Saratoga’s Pollinator and Native Plant Committee. Here is our recognition of the people who made it happen…we apologize if we missed anyone…please let us know if we did!

Our Hosts

Thank you first and foremost to Brian and Debbie Oligny of Oligny’s Country Gardens for letting us use their greenhouse to grow our plants and then letting us host the Palooza on their beautiful property in Gansevoort. They have been steadfast supporters of this event from the moment we suggested it more than three years ago. We could not hold the Palooza without them and thank them for their warmth, advice, and good-natured tolerance of people trooping in and out of their greenhouse for months.

Thank you to the Olignys’ neighbor, Jeff Mancini, for letting us use his property as a parking lot for the second year in a row. We really appreciate the ability to handle crowds safely because of his generosity. If you came to the first Palooza, you know how important the parking lot is to the event.

The Palooza Planning Team

A huge thank you to Christine Burghart, who is the founder of Palooza and its chief cook and bottlewasher. She conceived of the event, named it and made it happen. Without her, we would just be handing out seed packets at the farmer’s market instead of supplying the region with thousands of native perennial flowers.

The Team: Christine Burghart, Johanna Garrison, Dianna Goodwin, Jennifer Michelle, Tina O’Hanlon, Wendy Mahaney, Paul Murphy, Caroline Rothaug and Kelsey Trudell. It took a lot of time and effort to pull it off again, and we did it!

Johanna Garrison and Wendy Mahaney. Along with Chris, they are the brains behind the event. The three of them work hard to choose the plants, provide information on them, pot them up and staff the greenhouse.

The potting crew who carefully potted up all our seedlings: Lori Bishop, Christine Burghart, Nora Cheek, Kathryn Edwards, Johanna Garrison, Dianna Goodwin, Shelley Hachenski, Julie Holmberg, Bethany Khan and Natalie, Wendy Mahaney, Jennifer Michelle, Alexandra Morgan, Tina O’hanlon, Caroline Rothaug, Mary Jo Salomon, Susan Taylor, Karen Totino, Maria Trabka, and Kelsey Trudell.

The greenhouse volunteers who watered and cared for our plants daily for nearly two months: Chris Burghart, Dianna Goodwin, Caroline Rothaug and Kelsey Trudell.

Thank you to Candice Bergmann for making our social media look so good. And to Beth Plummer, Sustainable Saratoga’s Media Coordinator, for help with getting the word out. And to Jodi Visconti and the Saratoga Springs High School Graphic Design and Printing Club for our beautiful new banners.

Our generous donors

Kudos to Jennifer Michelle for soliciting an amazing array of donations for the raffle for the third year in a row, and to Jennifer, Kate Edwards, and Maja Mahaney for selling the raffle tickets and minding the table. Congratulations to all the winners!

Thank you to the businesses and individuals who donated items for our raffle: 9 Miles East Farm, American Beauties Native Plants, Balet Flowers and Design, Booth’s Blend Compost, Chris’ Garden Glass, Dawn’s Wild Things Rescue Nursery, Eastern Mountain Sports, Kayak Shak,Roosevelt Baths and Spa, Saratoga Olive Oil Company, and Saratoga Quality Hardware.

A special thanks to Martha Johnson at Slack Hollow Farm for planting and growing out the milkweed seedlings we gave away at the Sustainable Saratoga table. Thank you to Janet Britt for helping plant the fly-away milkweed seeds.

Food for mind and body

Click the arrows to scroll through the photos

We truly appreciate the participating organizations and their tables filled with information and demonstrations to educate us on land preservation and the importance of native plants to our birds and pollinators: Capital Region PRISM, City of Saratoga Springs Participatory Budgeting, Cornell Cooperative Extension Saratoga County Master Gardeners, Grassland Bird Trust,Merck Forest and Farmland Center, North Shore Animal League, Saratoga PLAN, SoBro conservancy of Saratoga, Southern ADK Audubon Society, Wild Ones Capital Region, and Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park.

Thank you again to the food and beverage truck vendors who provided sustenance to the hungry crowds:  Coach’s Corner and Sustainable Eats.

An enthusiastic round of applause to the Saratoga Springs High School Fiddle Club who entertained us all. Come back again next year!

Our incredible volunteers

Thank you to our Palooza volunteers who prepared for the day, set up the event, directed traffic, staffed the tables, answered questions in the greenhouse, cashiered, kept things flowing, and cleaned up at the end. In alphabetical order they are: Braelyn Bourgeois, Michael Cohen, Alex Couture, Serene Couture, Leanne Donelan, Amy Durland, Kate Edwards, Anne Ernst, Susan Fairchild, Laura Faulk, Dianna Goodwin, Barbara Lasher, Elaine McArdle, Tom McNamara, Dave McKeighan, Shannon McKeighan, Jennifer Michelle, Alexandra Morgan, Paul Murphy, Tina O’Hanlon, Maja Smemo, Mathew Smith, Judy Staubo, Chuck Tirone, Maria Trabka, Ben Trudell, and Jody Visconti.

And YOU!

And, finally, a big thank you to all the gardeners who gave new homes to the plants we grew. Expand your garden beds and come back next year! Consider volunteering! We need you!

Read More

Get more info on our Pollinators and Native Plants pages

See the details of the most recent Pollinator Palooza, including plant lists and photos

Pollinator Garden Profile - Wendy Mahaney

#killyourlawn

Wendy Mahaney, an environmental scientist and former executive director of Sustainable Saratoga, moved to Wilton in 2015. Since then, Wendy has slowly transformed her suburban lawn into a thriving ecosystem filled with native plants, butterflies, bumblebees, fireflies, hummingbirds, bluebirds, voles and a few ravenous bunnies.

In 2023, Wendy, with the help of her husband and daughters, removed most of her remaining front lawn and replaced it with plants indigenous to this region. In 2022, her flower garden was around 1450 square feet; in 2023, she added 1800 square feet of garden beds.

We were excited about the transformation of her lawn and asked if she would talk to us about her garden and the decision making that went into it.

Growing up, my family had a huge vegetable garden and my mom and I created several flower gardens around the house. We never gave much thought to whether something was native or not, we just bought things that were pretty and put them in the garden alongside what I refer to as our sentimental plants – plants that had special memories, like the ones that came from my great-grandmother’s gardens.

I always loved urban yards that were entirely flower gardens. My sister converted her small front lawn into a beautiful flower garden that looked amazing all year long. While my suburban yard is a bit bigger than the typical urban front yard, I kept dreaming about ditching the lawn altogether. Grass isn’t meant to grow in our hot, dry, sandy environment. Native plants have evolved to live in this environment, so why not work with nature instead of fighting it? Joining Sustainable Saratoga’s pollinator group provided the ingredients I needed to make the dream a reality. I had comradery and shared expertise from some amazing women, and a supply of native plants. So, 2023 was the year I decided to just do it.

I spent a huge amount of time thinking about the garden design, which plants to use, how to create paths, and how to keep it natural but not so wild that it bothered my neighbors. I wanted to use this garden as an opportunity to show my neighbors that a mostly native flower garden/pollinator habitat can be a vibrant and beautiful alternative to the cookie cutter, low-diversity, boring American lawn.

While I try to only plant native species now, I didn’t pull out the cultivars or the sentimental plants from my great-grandmother’s and my mother’s gardens. The new plants I’ve added in the last two years have mostly come from Sustainable Saratoga’s Pollinator Palooza native plant sale and from Wild Things Rescue Nursery in Valley Falls, NY. It is important to me that my plants are not treated with insecticides that can linger in the soil and be toxic to insects for a long time, so I only buy plants from reliable sources.

Adding a new 1800 square foot garden is not cheap, but it is a one-time expense. Mulch, compost, plants and equipment rental cost around $1700 – almost half of that was for the compost to try to increase the organic matter content of the sandy soils. I installed approximately 130 plants in the new garden, most of which were purchased, bringing my native species count up to 50. I added 36 of those species in the last two years, so you can see where my gardening interests are heading!

We have heard from many people who want to know how to get started with native plant gardening. Although we have talked around this issue before, if you have never planted a garden, some of our suggestions may assume too much basic knowledge. This post aims to tell you how to start a pollinator garden from scratch in and around Saratoga County, New York. The timing and plants will be different in other areas, but the basic principles will be the same.

Pick your spot

If you want to plant pollinator flowers, you need sun. Ideally, the garden should have 8 or more hours of full sun, but I have a garden in the shadow of a building that only gets six hours of full sun and it does just fine. Pollinators and their flower hosts thrive in sun. You can have a nice garden with native shade plants, but it won’t attract as many pollinators as a sunny garden.

Prepare your soil

To prepare the earth for your young plants, you need to remove the competition. That is, you have to get rid of the turf grass or other plants that are in the way. The best way that I know of to prepare a garden bed is to use the “lasagna method,” also known as sheet mulching. In the lasagna method you cut down or pull out and discard whatever vegetation is in your future native plant bed, then dig or use a stirrup hoe to disturb the roots that remain in the ground (dig out and throw away big pieces of root so they don’t re-sprout). Once the soil is more or less bare, place a layer of corrugated brown cardboard over the ground where you want your flower bed to be. Black and white newspaper also works, but use several layers. Don’t use glossy magazine inserts or even the funnies – save those for wrapping birthday presents. Place a three- to four-inch layer of high-quality organic compost on top the cardboard. You can make the compost yourself or purchase it from a nursery or a reliable supplier.

Water the bed well. If it doesn’t rain, keep watering the bed so the cardboard will start to break down. Wait six weeks for the unwanted seeds and plant parts under the cardboard to germinate and die. The cardboard will be soft and you can plant your native perennials right into it. Everything under the cardboard will be dead and rotting, perfect for feeding your new plants. The lasagna method is great because it controls weeds while adding aged compost and decomposing plant matter to your garden from the very beginning. It doesn’t matter if you have to delay your planting for six weeks and don’t get your plants into the ground till the end of June or early July – they are perennials, not tomatoes, and will do just fine. You can also plant native perennials in the fall, so if you miss the May-June planting season, prepare your garden bed in late summer and plant into it in September. You can even start a lasagna bed in the fall and wait until spring to plant into it. In that case, don’t bother watering, nature will take care of it.

Pesticides and lawn care

If you have a lawn service that uses herbicides or insecticides, or if you use them yourself on your yard, DO NOT PLANT A POLLINATOR GARDEN. The grubs in lawns that people think they have to spray are beetles. Beetles are insects. The pesticides that kill those beetles will kill your Monarch butterflies and bumblebees. Pesticides drift to nontarget flower beds so any pollinator garden adjacent to a lawn or other part of your property or a near neighbor’s property that gets sprayed will be a death trap for the pollinators that come to your flowers. If you want a pollinator garden, you cannot use insecticides. It is a basic choice that must be made before you start your garden. If you like birds and butterflies, the choice is easy.

Plan your garden

My suggestion is to spend several hours on the internet looking at plants available from regional native plant nurseries that supply plants suitable for the Northeast United States (in our case, some of the nurseries may be in Ohio or Pennsylvania, but don’t go too far south or too far west or the plants will not native to our region). This list of Native Plants for Pollinators and Beneficial Insects for the Northeast Region from the Xerces Society is a great place to start. See what looks good to you. Doodle sketches. Learn what kinds of insects are attracted to which flowers. Include common milkweed for the monarchs in your plan. Then be flexible. It is a garden, not rocket science. Your goal is to help pollinators and create something of beauty and interest. Everything else doesn’t matter. And if you make a mistake this year, you can fix it next year. Gardening is wonderful that way; each year is a new opportunity.

In planning your garden keep in mind that large patches of the same flower are easier for pollinators to find and make their foraging more efficient. We tend to want to plant in an orderly fashion with contrasting colors and formal garden patterns. Pollinators prefer big swaths of a single blooming plant species and will switch what they search for a number of times over the course of the season as flowers bloom and fade. If you can tolerate it and have space, plant for the convenience of insects; a full bed of black eyed susans or coneflowers in one part of the garden, a large border of goldenrods and asters in another part, a milkweed patch for the monarch butterflies in August and September. If you don’t want to have large patches, try to use at least three of the same species of plant together rather than using single plants.

Some help with the planning: Prairie Moon Nursery sells native plants and has a fabulous set of filters that can help you plan your garden. You can sort plants by color, height, bloom time, region, and climate zone. In Saratoga Springs, we are in zone 5a. Pick plants that are easy to grow, that interest you, that bloom at different times and that are hosts to both native bees and native butterflies. Some of the best pollinator plants in our region are wood asters, New England asters, lance leaf coreopsis, black eyed Susans, blue lobelia, Joe-Pye weed, woodland sunflowers, blue false indigo, milkweed, mountain mint, native bee balms, native coneflowers, evening primrose and any and all goldenrods.

Consult native plant nurseries and the Garden for Wildlife program of the National Wildlife Federation for ideas. You can also talk to/take a field trip to visit one of our near-by native plant nurseries: Wild Things Rescue Nursery or Catskill Native Nursery. This is an area of growing interest for horticulturalists, so new native plant nurseries may be popping up soon. You can also look at the plant list for Sustainable Saratoga’s Pollinator Palooza native plant sale (heldJune 4) and work some of those plants into your plan since they are well suited for local conditions in our region and were selected because pollinators love them. Finally, download a plant app to your phone so that you can identify flowers you like when you go on nature walks or visit other people’s gardens. Seek is my favorite app for flowers; it tells you whether a plant is native or introduced so it is very useful for garden planning.

Buying and caring for your native perennials before planting

Be sure you deal only with nurseries or growers that do not use pesticides. If you buy native plants from a big box store, they will probably be treated with neonicotinoids or other harmful chemicals that will kill every insect pollinator that you attract to your garden. Do not buy from them, no matter how reasonable the price. If you are buying plants at the farmers’ market, ask the farmer if the plants are organically grown. If they aren’t, ask them what kinds of insecticides they use on them. If they give you any answer other than, “We don’t use insecticides,” shop elsewhere. And politely tell them why you are not buying from them so that they understand there is a market for insecticide-free bedding plants. It is safer to buy from a native plant nursery on line than from a big box store, a local non-native nursery or farmers who spray their plants with insecticides.

Only buy true native types, not cultivars or nativars. Our local pollinators evolved with our local plants. Although plant breeders may “improve” on those plants, that is, select for traits that are desirable to human gardeners such as unusual colors or extra petals, those traits are usually not as attractive to insects as they are to people. And those special traits may come at a cost to the quality of pollen or nectar or some function of the plant that makes appealing it to insect pollinators. Just say no to innovation.

If you have to wait a while to plant in the ground after purchasing your perennials, water the plants regularly since they dry out quickly in pots. Keep them in the sun outside unless they were greenhouse grown, in which case you should move them over the course of a week or so from dappled shade to full sun. If they aren’t used to direct sun, the intense light can burn their leaves. If that happens, it is not the end of the world, new leaves will grow. It is just better not to set your little plants back before you put them in the ground.

Planting

Dig a hole, put the plant into it so that it is covered up to the same spot on its stem as when it was in the pot. That is, not so deep that part of its green stem is in the ground and not so shallow that the tops of its roots are above the ground. Dig a hole big enough so you don’t have to curl the roots up to get them to fit in the hole. Fill the hole back in and tamp the soil down around the plant with your hands, not your feet. Soil contact is important so you want your plant to be firmly in place but you don’t want to compress the soil too much or trample the plant by mistake.

For spacing plants, look at the information on the Prairie Moon Nursery website or whatever information the nursery where you bought them provided you. Bigger plants need more space between them than smaller plants. Some plants spread easily, give them extra room. Most plants can be moved in the spring or fall if you make a mistake and plant them too closely together, so don’t fret about it. Milkweed may be an exception, it doesn’t like to be transplanted.

Watering

Water the plants every day for the first couple of weeks unless it rains. As they start to look healthy and grow, you can water less often, but watering at least every other day is important during the first growing season while their roots are establishing. If it is really hot and dry, water every day. Plants build their bodies out of water and thin air; you can help them out with the water part. Learn about photosynthesis and appreciate the miraculous way plants sustain life on earth. We need to eat, they create food for us and everyone else on the planet out of carbon dioxide and water. We need to breath, they emit oxygen and water as waste products of photosynthesis. Amazing, right? Pollinators are not the only creatures that depend on plants for their survival.

Weeding

Just like you need to give your plants bare ground to start out in life, you need to keep down the weeds until they get established. I once heard a farmer say that rather than yank out giant weeds, you should kill the weeds while they are small by tickling the ground weekly with a hoe. This is very good advice. Buy a stirrup hoe, keep it sharp by filing it between uses, and gently move it through the soil around your plants before the weeds get large. If a big weed pops up after you have gone on vacation or is too close to your perennial to use a hoe, you can pull it out by hand, but a stirrup hoe is the right tool for ground tickling. Around year two or three as your native plants grow and spread, weeding won’t be as important, especially if you have a big patch of one kind of plant.

Other Maintenance

Don’t put down wood chips or any other mulch except compost. You can add compost whenever you feel like it and can make the garden look nice with compost “mulch” if you like things tidy. Do not, under any circumstances, ever use insecticides. Don’t use herbicides. Don’t use non-organic chemical fertilizer. Native perennials don’t need much, they are tough northern species. With native plants, less is better. Leave them alone, except for watering, weeding and occasional composting. If a plant lists to the side, feel free to trim it lightly or trellis it or prop it up. And turn off your porch lights at night. Nocturnal insects and birds, as well as virtually all plants, do better with no artificial light. Porch lights, especially LED lights, interfere with wildlife of all kinds. Lights out for wildlife.

Putting the plants to bed in the winter

Don’t. They will be fine. Don’t deadhead the flowers or cut the stems down, leave them to be shelter and food for the small creatures living their lives in your yard. Don’t rake the leaves from the beds, they provide minerals and nutrients to your plants for free and are excellent overwintering substrate for fireflies. The plants will emerge through the leaves in the spring. Don’t put down wood chip mulch or other weed-smothering devices. Ground bees and bumble bees need bare ground for their nests and can’t penetrate wood chips. Whenever you think of an intervention to do in your native plant garden in the fall, go take a nap instead. In the spring, water again as needed, weed again as needed and maybe add some more compost. Fill in any gaps with new plants or, better yet, kill some more of your lawn and make your native plant bed bigger.

The nice thing about perennial native plants is that the conditions here are right for them and they are not as fussy as exotic plants that would really prefer to be on the heath in Scotland or on a warm grassy plain in China or something. They belong here, they can take care of themselves once they are in place. The insects recognize them and they continue their long evolutionary dance together. Right in your yard. You have a front row seat.

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Resources

See our Pollinator and Native Plants pages for information and resources

Get info on Composting from our Zero Waste committee

Pollinator Palooza native plant lists: 2023, 2022

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Maybe you already know that turf grass lawns are bad for the environment. Maintaining turf grass requires mowing, watering, fertilizing and often the application of herbicides and insecticides. At best, traditional lawns don’t provide any support for native wildlife. At worst, the chemicals that wash out of them have an adverse impact on non-target insects, birds, and mammals. In some cases, humans are also affected as chemicals enter our neighborhoods, our drinking water, and our rivers, lakes, and oceans. But what can you do about it?

 

This fall, when it comes time to prepare your lawn for the following summer, try some alternative seeds, plants, and care methods to make your lawn more environmentally sound. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to spend more time enjoying your summer. Alternative lawns require less or no mowing, minimal weeding, no fertilization, no pesticides, and less to no watering once they are established.

The first step is easy. No matter how much or little turf you have, follow the advice of the Cornell Cooperative Extension for changing up your lawn care routine: Mowing higher and watering correctly gives you healthier grass and shades out weeds. Check out their advice on how to prevent disease while using fewer chemicals.

Whatever kind of lawn you have, we urge you to make a pledge to stop using pesticides. Most don’t discriminate between the pests they are meant to kill and the ones we want to keep around. They are destroying insect populations worldwide and harming wildlife along the entire food web. Biodiversity is only possible with a strong and diverse food web.

It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Change out a patch or two of grass next season and see how it goes. If you like it, you can expand it. Try different alternatives in different spots. Find something that will thrive in those spots where it’s always been hard to grow grass. Here are just a few fantastic alternatives:

Low growing fescues – Fescue grasses stay green all summer and require little mowing and less water than a traditional grass lawn. No Mow or Low Water seed mixes are available online from several sources.

Native grass and plant lawn– Replace part or all of your lawn with native grasses and low growing native perennials and annuals that require minimal maintenance. For a real-life example, look at the Cornell Botanic Gardens Native Lawns project. See the list of species that thrive in our area on page 17.

Native flower beds – Bump out your flower beds a bit each year to gradually reduce lawn area. Replace grass with native flower species to promote biodiversity, and allow a cornucopia of insect pollinators and birds to thrive. There are three well established native nurseries in the region that can provide you with plants and advice, or even garden plans for your property: Wild Things Rescue Nursery, Catskill Native Nursery and Jessecology.

Clover and thyme – Gradually replace your lawn with low growing clovers and creeping thymes. While these plants are not native, they do have some food value for bees. Clover seed is easy to obtain from nurseries. It’s green and about the same height as grass lawns with almost no maintenance. Thyme lawns can be soft and smell wonderful if the plants are crushed underfoot.

Wildflower meadow – For an excellent example of how to convert a lawn to a wildflower meadow, see the University of New Hampshire’s Planting for Pollinators Fact Sheet. This is an aesthetic adjustment, but beautiful and rewarding. American Meadows has wildflower seed kits suitable for growing in the Northeast.

No Mow – Simply stop mowing and see what happens. Be ready to weed out invasive species as they appear (there are many apps to help identify native vs introduced species. Seek is particularly good for our region, as is iNaturalist). Eventually, native plants will grow in place of the grass. Many people who stop mowing most of their lawn still mow the edges of their former lawns to show that what they are doing is intentional.

Check your city ordinances or home owners’ association rules – if wild lawns are not permitted then work on getting those rules changed!

With all your free time not spent mowing, you could read books, grow a vegetable garden, get a master’s degree, play with your children, or start a movement in support of biodiversity. Enjoy the journey.

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The Pollinator Palooza plant sale put over 1500 native plants into the yards of gardeners all over our region and raised thousands of dollars to help Sustainable Saratoga carry out its mission. And, it was the hard work and generosity of many individuals that made it all possible. If we forgot to include you in the list below, please let us know and we will correct our mistake!

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Thank you first and foremost to Brian and Debbie Oligny for letting us use their greenhouse free of charge to grow our plants, and then letting us host the Palooza on their beautiful property in Gansevoort. We literally could not have done it without them.

A huge thank you to Christine Burghart, whose baby this was. She conceived of the event, named it and made it happen. It was thrilling to watch her in action.

Thank you to the greenhouse team who potted out 1500 plants and watered them daily for two months: Chris Burghart, Nora Cheek, Johanna Garrison, Dianna Goodwin, Julie and Art Holmberg, Gayle Kyler, Lois Leonard, Wendy Mahaney and her extended family, and Rachelle Thomas.

Thank you to the generous donors who gave us seed money to get the Palooza off the ground: Adirondack Trust Company, Chris Burghart, Johanna Garrison, Dianna Goodwin, Julie Holmberg, and Roohan Realty.

Thank you to the businesses that donated items for our raffle: American Beauties Native Plants, Balet Flowers, Booth’s Blend Compost, Catskill Native Nursery, Dehn’s Flowers, Eastern Mountain Sports, Featherbed Lane Farm, Roosevelt Baths and Spa, Saratoga Olive Oil Company, and Wild Things Rescue Nursery.

Big thank you to Jennifer Michelle for soliciting donations for the raffle. Thanks to Nora Cheek for organizing the raffle displays. And thanks to Nora and Jeff Cheek and Maja Mahaney for selling tickets at the Palooza. Nice job!

Thank you to Hannaford for providing snacks and drinks.

Thank you to Capital Region PRISM, Saratoga PLAN and Wild Ones for setting up information tables and demonstrations at the Palooza.

Thank you to our Palooza volunteers who prepared for the day, set up the event, directed traffic, staffed the booths, answered questions in the greenhouse, cashiered, kept things flowing, and cleaned up at the end. In alphabetical order they are: Robin Ambrosino, Sierra Bouchard, Chris and Karl Burghart, Nora and Jeff Cheek, Dan Chernoff, Max and Michael Cohen, Diane and Tom Denny, Anne Ernst, Laura Faulk, Art and Julie Holmberg, Eileen Hurley, Johanna Garrison, Dianna Goodwin, Deb Johnson, Cassandra Kellam, Gayle Kyler and Wayne, Lois Leonard, Bob Lippman, Maja and Wendy Mahaney, Paul Murphy, Jennifer Michelle, Caroline Rothaug, Lisa Salamon and Margie Shepard.

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And, finally, a big thank you to all the gardeners who showed up in droves to support our efforts and to give new homes to the plants we grew. We sold out of everything except a few exceptionally scraggly milkweed plants. We planted them elsewhere and they are doing well.

Thank you!

The Sustainable Saratoga Pollinator Initiative Committee

Want to know more? Check out our Pollinator pages