Children plant wild flowers in Hoogkerk – Hoogkerkonline.nl

‘We want wild flowers!’, the children of the Hoogkerk Children’s District Council said a year ago. Together they submitted this idea to Sterk Hoogkerk under the Green theme. The residents voted in favor of this idea in October 2023 and it became reality last Friday.

It is a quarter past two on Friday, April 26. A group of people gathers on Prinses Margrietstraat. One by one, the children from the Children’s District Council also come to the lawn where it will happen: the idea of ​​’colorful green areas with wild flowers’ becomes reality. How did the children come up with this idea? Ilse: ‘Through the Green Hoogkerk theme. There is always a lot of dog poop in the grass. But if there are beautiful flowers there, the dogs don’t poop there.’

Blossoming plants
Part of the field has already been prepared by Matthieu Haanstra of Koers BV. There are sods with plants on a strip of approximately 10 meters long and 6 meters wide. Matthieu: ‘These sods contain plants with four types of flowering flowers and herbs. They will soon be available to admire. The flowering plants will be visible three or four times a year. These plants are good for insects and good for your mood. It always makes people happy.’

But how has the Children’s District Council tackled this? Tjebelina, supervisor of the children’s district council, says: ‘Sterk Hoogkerk put us in touch with someone from the municipality, Roelke Nienhuis. Roelke visited a meeting of the Children’s District Council. We also cycled a route through Hoogkerk to see where there would be suitable places. The original idea was to place these plants along the Zuiderweg. But that turned out not to be possible because of the many trees. These provide too much shade and these plants should be in the sun.’

Sods
Sods still need to be laid on a small part of the lawn. The children are given garden gloves with the text ‘Hoogkerk in Action’ and then get to work. Matthieu helps to roll up the sods and mark them. The sods are quite heavy and muddy, but the children don’t care about that. They help a lot and the sods are in place in no time. If a sod does not quite fit, it must be trimmed. Sem and Ilse from the children’s neighborhood council help with this.

Roelke: ‘We opted for perennial flowering plants. These are only mowed twice a year so that they can bloom several times a year. When the plants bloom they produce seeds which then spread and grow again. That’s why we mow as little as possible.’

Trash cans
Now that this project has been completed, the Children’s District Council certainly wants to submit another idea to Sterk Hoogkerk. Nikky: ‘We want to improve the skating rink.’ Sem also has a good idea because Clean Hoogkerk is one of this year’s themes: ‘I want more and better waste bins. I’ve seen trash cans somewhere with a sensor that opens and closes the trash cans. And that sensor also indicates when the trash can is full. Very handy.’

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