While ISU Extension and Outreach urges Iowans to create or maintain breeding habitats for monarch butterflies during the summer months, a group of kids have been building a butterfly garden to help pollinators.

The Mary J. Barnett Memorial Library Kids Club has spent the last few weeks planting milkweed and other plants at the garden located west of the library. Nine-year-old Kahsyn Tearney explains this particular kind of fertilization, “Pollination is usually flowers and bees and butterflies pollinate other flowers so they grow and also they help us make our food.”

Assistant Library Director Ronda Weber says once the garden is completed it will be registered with the Blank Park Zoo’s “Plant.Grow.Fly.” conservation initiative. This is the third year of the library’s Kids Club, which typically meets three Tuesdays a month, doing activities like legos and movie screenings. When asked whether the kids would return for next year’s Kids Club, the group gave a resounding “Yes!”

The Kids Club is free and open to all Guthrie Center area kids, and will return next September.