10/15/2024
Over the past two years, Ramsey County Master Gardeners have been engaged in renovating two large rain gardens in the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood, working side by side with members of the St. Anthony Park Community Council, neighbors, and more recently, Minnesota Water Stewards. The project has been funded by the Capitol Region Watershed District.
The two gardens were installed by the City of St. Paul in 2015 when Raymond Ave. was reconfigured. At the time the St. Anthony Park Community Council offered to be the gardens’ caretakers. However, by 2022, thanks to years of drought and some design flaws, the red-twigged dogwood that had been in the basins mostly died and opportunistic plants, primarily Canada thistle and stinging nettle, decided to move in. The hot mess in the garden at the intersection of Raymond and Ellis garnered complaints to the City and became more work than what neighborhood volunteers could handle. Although there was some maintenance funding available, it could not cover the cost of hiring a landscape company to renovate the gardens.
So, in June 2023, a group of Ramsey County Master Gardener mentors and interns, affectionately called the “Fiddleheads,” took on weeding the gardens. The project was a thorn. Pretty literally, as you could not escape being pricked by thistle, nettle, or the rosa rugosa bushes that encircled the gardens. Thanks to the advice from many different rain garden experts, we solarized the Ellis rain garden in summer 2023, then seeded a cover crop of winter wheat in the fall to squelch the weeds. And then we waited. The project was budding.
In 2024 the St. Anthony Park Community Council applied for and received a large grant from Capitol Region Watershed District to renovate the gardens. In the Ellis garden the winter wheat came in thick and tall in the spring and a landscape company came in to knock it down. Thanks to making the gardens an official RCMG site we had more volunteers who continued to weed both gardens on a weekly basis. This time around there was much less thistle, and even the nettle was secondary to more common, less painful weeds. In May and June volunteers focused on the garden at Raymond and Bayless, where weeding, mulching, and adding more native plants and shrubs yielded great results. In July we solarized the Ellis garden a second time, and the first week of September, after a landscape company spread mulch over the 2,100 square foot garden, volunteers helped plant over 260 native grasses and forbs. Sure, some of the new plantings might not make it, but the response from the community–as they walk by with their dogs, children, and groceries from Hampden Co-op–has been nothing but positive. Their enthusiasm and appreciation give us reason to consider this project a bloom.
Kerry Morgan
RCMG Volunteer
SAP Community Rain Garden Co-Lead