Waterwise Garden – Beautiful and water conscious

Provided.

Past President Paul Kaminski, Kimberly Bittner and her husband, Fred Bittner.

The Rotary Club of Tehachapi was treated to an informative presentation by Kimberly Bittner, a member of the Bear Valley Springs Garden Club. An avid gardener, Kimberly talked about the Waterwise Garden project in Bear Valley, located at the corner of S. Lower Valley Rd. and Cumberland Rd., next to the parking lot of the Bear Valley Community Services District (BVCSD) office. The garden was originally established over 25 years ago, to help educate residents about options for low water landscaping.

Kimberly and her husband, Fred, have been married for 50 years, and they are very proud of their three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. During her career, she worked for many years as an accountant in nonprofit organizations and, after moving to Bakersfield in 2014, she took a job with a mid-size farming operation. Kimberly and her husband are very active in the Bear Valley Springs community, volunteering with the church and various clubs.

When Kimberly retired in 2021, she was looking for fulfilling ways to spend her time, so she joined the Bear Valley Garden Club. She became particularly interested in making improvements to the Waterwise Garden. She discovered that the garden, which looked like it needed some love, had been established years earlier by the very same Garden Club she had joined. Although suffering from a lack of maintenance, she could see the potential within the garden's borders and set about developing ideas for improvements.

Kimberly originally had considered establishing a butterfly garden in Bear Valley, but she found a perfect location within the Waterwise Garden project. She felt that it was important and beneficial to identify and transform an area in a strategic location in the existing garden to attract pollinators, rather than starting a separate garden project elsewhere in Bear Valley. The BVCSD gave them a small budget to work with, on the condition that they provide all the labor. Their biggest challenge was, and still is, getting volunteers to make improvements and maintain the garden over the years.

The first thing they did was put down garden mulch. Kimberly said, "We also did a lot of weeding in the early stages, and that is a task that is still time consuming to this day." They added gravel pathways, and the change over time has been dramatic. In 2023, they held a reopening ceremony to celebrate the transformed garden, which gives visitors a beautiful place to come with stunning views of the lake. BVCSD helped their project along by putting in new garden furniture. A carved bear carved statue now graces the garden, which also has a butterfly, honeybee and hummingbird, to remind everyone about the importance of pollinators.

One of their goals was to update and improve the signage in the garden, so they could better inform and educate the local community about the importance of gardens and drought resistant gardening. She said that it is important to provide information and strategies on how residents can have a lovely yard while reducing the amount of grass and, along with that, water use. Each plant in the garden is marked with an identifying sign, which indicates if the plant attracts various pollinators. The signs also provide a QR code that can be scanned with a cell phone. Scanning the code provides a link to more educational information about that specific plant, including characteristics, water needs, sun requirements and care. This can be especially helpful if wanting plants that will be resistant to deer, elk and other animals, important in our local area. The information on all the plants in the garden is also available on the BVCSD website.

Kimberly said, "It's rewarding to see what can happen when a community of volunteers comes together with purpose to make good things happen."

To thank Kimberly Bittner for her presentation, Past President Paul Kaminski presented her with a certificate, and a donation was made to the Rotary Foundation in her honor.

The Tehachapi Rotary Club meets at noon every Thursday at Kelcy's. Rotary is the largest service organization in the world, and is committed to "Service Above Self," devoting time and resources to projects in the local community as well as internationally. For more information about the Rotary Club, you can visit their Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/RotaryClubofTehachapi/.