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Parks & Environmental Services
No Mow May encourages pollinator population By DANI MESSICK | The Municipal
In the city of La Crosse, Wis., grasses and weeds covered an assortment of locations for a solid month this spring. The city had halted its regular ordinance for maintenance to ensure local pollinators could begin to thrive. “Some of the habitats and food sources are quite limited with urban lawn mowing,” explained Leah Miller, outdoor recreation coordinator for the city of La Crosse Parks Department. Registration for No Mow May began two weeks before May and continued throughout the month. “We found it important that residents were able to register with us so that we could collect the data source of how many people are participating and also so we could follow up and give them tips, resources and at the end a survey to better understand how effective the program was in our community,” Miller said. By the end of the first week of May, roughly 1,200 residents were registered for 50 THE MUNICIPAL | JULY 2022
the program, representing approximately 9% of the residential lots in the city. Miller said it’s more than she had anticipated, having looked at the results from a previous program in Appleton, where there were only 400 participants in the first year of the program. “There’s been some chatter about this program over the last couple years and a lot of people have at least heard about it, which I think is what made me impressed with the numbers,” she said. The city of La Crosse’s program was modeled after Appleton, which in turn had been modeled after a program from the United Kingdom, according to Miller.
ABOVE: City officials offered participants in No Mow May signs to help explain the lawn commotion throughout neighborhoods. (Photo provided by the city of La Crosse, Wis.)
“The primary emphasis of this program, in its infancy stages, was to focus on bees,” she said. “We feel the same way because of the declining population of bees that we’re seeing worldwide, but we also want to call out that this isn’t just only for bees. There are a lot of pollinators out there, and they all serve very important purposes.” In May, Miller noted that in La Crosse, the year’s spring had been relatively cold with little rain, meaning she expected that grasses would not get as high as they had in other years. “Pollinators are generally beneficial,” she said. “A lot of what we hear about them is that their main service is to pollinate plants and crops to support our food sources, but they’re also food for other species in the
