From Landfill to Pollinator Paradise: Rewilding a forgotten space (Ep. 75)

Today we travel to the gorgeous Adironacks protected region in upper state New York where a once‑forgotten landfill is being transformed into something extraordinary. Thanks to the vision of local nonprofit ADKAction and the dedication of community partners, the capped landfill is on its way to becoming a thriving pollinator meadow, alive with native plants, buzzing bees, and fluttering butterflies.

Communications Manager Kristina Hartzell and Project Coordinator Kailey Maher from AdkAction share how the idea first took shape, why a landfill is surprisingly well‑suited for a meadow, and what they’ve learned from the test plots planted last spring. Early monitoring has already revealed promising native species that can handle the site’s unique conditions while offering rich forage for pollinators.

But this project is about more than plants and pollinators—it’s about people. Local schools, volunteers, and town partners are all playing a role in bringing the meadow to life, turning an overlooked piece of land into a shared space for learning, stewardship, and connection.

AdkAction creates projects that address unmet needs, promote vibrant communities, and preserve the natural beauty of the Adirondacks for all. This habitat restoration project is still ongoing. Following the test plantings in 2025, the team is doing the main planting this year with the goal of a 2027 summer unveiling.

Good to know

The Adirondack Region is home to more than 100 communities and six million protected acres of mountains, lakes, valleys, and cliffs; which makes it the largest natural area in the U.S. outside Alaska. It’s an outdoor lover’s paradise: skiers flock here in winter, campers and paddlers fill the summers, and hikers and cyclists explore the trails all year round.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bees Knees a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer and I thank you for being here.

My favorite Bees Knees stories to tell are always the ones in which bees are bringing people together. Our story today is a wonderful one in which a community partners to turn forgotten ground into a flourishing space for pollinators and for people. A capped landfill in Indian Lake, New York is being reimagined as something far more beautifully beneficial.

Thanks to a restoration effort led by a ADKAction this former garbage dump is transforming into a pollinator paradise where wildflowers, bloom, bees buzz, and butterflies dance [00:01:00] through the breeze. In today’s episode, I’m joined by Kristina Hartzell and Kailey Maher from ADKAction to explore what it means to turn a retired landfill into a thriving habitat.

We talk about how the project came together, what they’ve learned from the test plot so far, and the hopes for this space as it evolves into an educational meadow for both wildlife and people. So let’s start with the big picture. Can you introduce a DK ADKAction to us? Sure. Um, and thank you again so much for having us on this ADKAction.

We’re a nonprofit organization and we are based in the Adirondack region of Northern New York State. So for anyone listening from outside the US, the Adirondacks, a 6 million acre protected park, which is bigger than some of our well-known national parks. It’s Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon combined.

Um, so people who are unfamiliar with the [00:02:00] area, it’s a really unusual place though because it’s not only wilderness. About 130,000 people live here in the park year round and these small rural communities that are surrounded by lakes, forests, mountains and they’re just dotted throughout the protected land.

So it’s a, a sort of rare. Both protected and communities together area. So our organization, ADKAction works here in this beautiful landscape to make life better for those 130,000 people and the people that come and live here seasonally, or who come and vacation here, we’re really about making life better for everyone in the Adirondack Park, um, while also protecting what makes our region so special ecologically.

So we focus on practical community driven solutions to the real challenges here. So that includes things like reducing road salt pollution to protect our clean water, um, [00:03:00] increasing access to healthy local food by working with our local farms, improving broadband service. And creating vibrant public spaces, community revitalization, and my absolute favorite project supporting pollinator habitat through our Adirondack pollinator project.

And just to add a little bit more across all of our work, we really operate at the intersection of environmental stewardship and community wellbeing. So our projects aren’t just about working at people or landscapes, they’re really about working with them. Um. This particular cap landfill revitalization habitat, really displays that.

That approach has shaped everything from our early monarch butterfly work to the much broader pollinator project we run today, which now includes native bees, wasps, moths, and all the pollinators that keep our park ecosystems and farms communities thriving. So we’re gonna talk about just one of the many projects you guys are involved in.

Tell me, how did the [00:04:00] idea to turn this landfill into a pollinator meadow come about? So something that’s, uh important to know about landfills in the Adirondacks, um, is a little bit of Adirondack history. So like a lot of rural regions in the US, every town here used to have its own landfill or like town dump. And, uh, in New York state.

In the nineties to the early 2000, all of the remaining landfills in the Adirondack Park were capped as part of a statewide effort to eliminate localized dumps and consolidate waste. And also it feels like everyone just woke up and realized at the same time that if you’re going have. All of this area that you’re trying to protect, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to dump a lot of trash there.

So just a a little further information, what cap means is sealed with a thick layer of clay and then grass over to meet environmental safety requirements. What you end up with is this [00:05:00] large grassy mound, usually fenced. Um, very much usually unused and sometimes sitting in the most beautiful places, these strange, glorious things that are hidden in plain sight.

The cap landfill in Indian Lake is a place just like that. I mean, you walk up onto it and all of a sudden you’re surrounded by these pines that just kind of separate before you, and then you have this miraculous view of the mountains that mean so much to all of us. So it’s just like this very unique space that for such a long time.

We kind of hurt the land by adding the garbage to it, where now we’re trying to to seek responsibility and turn it back into a place that not only the community can also revitalize and enjoy, but also our pollinators our birds. We’ve met a lovely snapping turtle and some snakes. So what is super interesting as well is that nature has already started to reclaim this space.

Now it’s our responsibility to help do our part in that. Yeah, and [00:06:00] so we had an intern a couple of years back, do a research project to analyze all of the different opportunities that we could have for large scale pollinator habitat restoration projects. I believe she looked at roadside. Plantings along telephone poles that cut through places and right of ways.

I think she looked at like ski mountains, solar, uh, solar farms, and we have done a planting at a solar farm as well. And, but then she analyzed all of that and found that the highest impact she recommended was. For landfills, capped landfills. So we just, we filed that information away and we had kept that in mind.

And then we were meeting with our contacts at the town of Indian Lake and um, Indian Lake actually has a Monarch Festival every year. And they call themselves the town that loves monarchs. They’re very big on monarch butterflies. And we were talking with them. They have a, a [00:07:00] community pollinator garden that we planted years back in front of their library and they said, well, we have this capped landfill.

We’d really like to do something with. And of course our ears perked up and we thought, oh, we are very interested in doing a capped landfill planting. And there aren’t any. This is, this is new for the Adirondacks. So together with their interest, we applied for a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Smart Growth Grant, uh, for the project.

And we were almost a little surprised we were awarded, and we were like, great. We’re doing it. So last spring, spring 2025, you planted some test plots and monitored them over the summer. What’s been the most surprising or exciting to observe so far? Yeah. So this first season really was all about learning.

We wanted to be informed by the land. We’re working with this magnificent environmental ecologist that is consulting with us. And his ethos is very much that it’s not about what you do to the land, [00:08:00] it’s about, or doing things with the land, not at the land. Um, the land already knows and so. We really wanted to be mindful of creating conditions where there were lots of amendments or added things to support growth that wouldn’t be sustainable in the future to support this new, uh, vegetation and plant life.

So we kind of scouted out what were the most native pollinator plants. To the Adirondacks and we actually host our own pollinator plant festival in June where we were able to create, um, three different test plots, um, north, south, east and west. And then also being mindful of either really dry conditions or wet conditions.

And we were lucky enough to have a intern from Colgate University that weekly would monitor the growth of these plans. So we were really able to make informed, um, choices. We just put it in, uh, first plant plug order, which was for about 5,500 plugs. Yeah. For For next spring? Yeah, for next spring. And that was based on [00:09:00] what the land was telling us.

Um, we’re still monitoring the seeding that we did. And actually I go out next Friday to see two more plots and we’ll just, again, we’re letting the land kind of tell us what does best there. So can you share a couple examples of what you’ll be planting now in the spring based on the knowledge that you learned last spring?

Definitely. So what we’ve been seeing in the landfill so far, obviously is the, the dry, sunny place plants have been doing pretty well. So the real star of the site has been grasses, little blue stem grass, and purple love grass. So both the little blue stem grass and purple lovegrass are these low clumping grasses with shallow roots, which is important for the capped landfill because there is only

so much depth that you can plant in before you get to the clay cap. So they kind of, these grasses hold the soil in place without digging too [00:10:00] deep or adding a ton of biomass, which is also important because we don’t wanna add lots of weight to the top of the landfill either. And so they, they kind of create this.

Stable matrix that everything else is growing within. Um, and then from there we built out with an intention, a mix that keeps something blooming from May all the way until October. And that’s really a key piece of the planting for pollinators. It provides something in bloom throughout almost every season of their lives, which again, is really important to their sustenance.

Early in the season, um, we’re hopeful to see things like ley for coops and blackeyed Susans, which are great for the first wave of bees waking up. But then come mid summer, we’re hopeful that bee balm will blossom cornflower and the milk weeds, which are huge for both bees and butterflies. And then finally, later in the year, we’re hopeful that we’ll see asters and golden rods taking over.

Late season Nectar again, is incredibly important, not [00:11:00] just for the resident pollinators, but also for monarchs and other insects that begin their migration or trying to build that really important energy to be able to survive throughout our hard winters. So you kind of mentioned this at the beginning a little bit, but this project is much more than just about the plants or the bees or the butterflies.

It’s about your community too. How else are the local partners and residents involved in this transformation? Oh, absolutely. So this is really a community project because our office is based about an hour and a half drive from Indian Lake, so we are definitely not gonna be the caretakers of this forever.

So it was very important to have this incredible partner in the town of community or in the town of Indian Lake. From the start, because we didn’t wanna just design this and then hand it over to them. So they’re really helping guide the vision and they’re gonna be the long-term stewards of the site. So as part of the project, we’ve engaged the local [00:12:00] school and the community center, and some volunteers we’re actually very excited Next.

Spring, we’re gonna be enlisting a large number of volunteers to join us in planting those 5,500 little baby plants at the site. And then we’re also gonna be seeding five acres with volunteers in the fall so that the seeds have a chance for that. Cold stratification to come up the following spring. And I think because the landfill is such this visible, familiar place to everyone in the small town, like transforming it into this beautiful and educational space really opens up opportunities for school field trips or community science projects and just this sense of pride in reclaiming the space for ecological health, I think.

Yeah, pretty. So you mentioned a couple things about your spring plantings and then seeding in the fall. But looking ahead, what else is your vision for this space and what do you hope people can learn or maybe adopt from this project? [00:13:00] No, that’s a great question. Our vision for the capped landfill is for it to become a thriving, colorful meadow, hopefully alive with abundance of bees, butterflies, beetles, native plants.

Again, the vision is to, we imagine people walking around, learning, reconnecting with the natural systems and, um, the ecosystem that surrounds them. But we also see this project as a model. There are cap landfills in town all across Adirondack and in all the rural communities everywhere. Really many of them could be repurposed to support biodiversity, climate resilience, and public engagement.

And we’re hopeful that this may become a easy model to reprint in those areas. We hope to show what’s possible, what creativity, collaboration, and then the willingness to think together with partnership in the town and the community, what can be accomplished. And so the takeaway ends up being quite [00:14:00] simple. Uh, pollinator habitats don’t have to be complicated.

You don’t need 20 acres. You don’t even need one acre, whether you have a yard, a balcony, a town park. You can plant native species, reduce mowing, and create pockets of habitat that add to something really meaningful. And so if this project inspires more people here in the Adirondacks and beyond, to work with nature instead of against it, and to see themselves as self stewards of the landscape they live in.

then we’ve accomplished something far more than just rewilding this cap landfill. We, we accomplish momentum forward into a world we all hope to imagine. The Indian Lake Pollinator meadow restoration is more than a habitat project. It’s a model for how creativity, science, and community partnerships can transform overlooked spaces into places of beauty and ecological value.

As we heard today, the test plots are already teaching the team, which native plants can [00:15:00] thrive here, and by 2027, the full scale meadow will welcome pollinators and people alike. It’s a reminder that restoration isn’t just about repairing the land, it’s about re-imagining what’s possible when we work together.

Thank you for listening in today, and thanks to Kristina and Kailey for sharing this wonderful project. Please visit the website to learn more about ADKAction and their work, and I’d love it if you’d share this episode with a friend. Until next time, think transformation.