In mid-August we added garden number 37 to the Corcoran Pollinator Project neighborhood initiative! It’s a sweet little hilly spot on 23rd Ave, and we look forward to watching it grow in the years to come. Garden #38 is coming up next, and we’ve also been supplementing and enhancing prior years’ gardens galore with the plants we started from seed last fall.
At this point in the summer, we hope you are seeing the monarchs arrive and thrive in your South Minneapolis neighborhoods. Seems there are fewer than last year, but hopefully that’s just due to the late spring and dry weather. Whatever the reason, it’s all the more motivation to keep up our work. Plant your prairie blazing star and let those milkweeds be!
We have been a little quiet over here on the website so far this year, too busy gardening I guess! The seeds we started in November 2021 and overwintered are nearly ready for installation! See a couple pictures below. We are looking for two interested Corcoran homes to accept new pollinator patches. Please reach out via the website if that’s you!
We are also planning a couple garden/bee walk dates for later July and August – so we can see which bees and other pollinators are present in the neighborhood. Sara spotted the Bombus Fervidus pictured at the top of this post, which is special because it’s a declining species of special concern in Wisconsin. Zach Portman, bee taxonomist at the University of Minnesota in the Cariveau Native Bee Lab and Sara Nelson, CPP’s founder, will lead the tours. Stay tuned for more info, and happy gardening in the meantime!
Our Lawns to Legumes-funded sod cutter has been assembled and it works! If you live in south Minneapolis, you can use it for free for the asking at the Corcoran Neighborhood Organization’s pollinator tool library. This makes it super quick and easy to remove grass in neat pieces so that you can get your next pollinator garden started. You hold it like a plow and kick the horizontal red bar to get the blade to slice through the grass roots. I recommend simply putting the removed sod in yard waste bags to be composted by the city, or you could put it inconspicuously in a pile in a corner of your yard as bee nesting habitat.
Something nice that’s been happening in the neighborhood is that a lot of people have been expanding their pollinator gardens to take up more and more of their yards, including people who have received CPP gardens in years past who are ready to expand. Back in June before the drought and Delta, several of us got together to add plants to existing gardens and admire how the plants have matured.
Here are a few CPP boulevard gardens looking extra lovely.
And a quick neighborhood bee and wasp gallery of (clockwise from top left) a green sweat bee on a volunteer crowned beggarticks, black and gold bumble bee on rocky mountain bee plant, a slumber party of male long-horned bees on Virginia mountain mint, a leafcutter bee on cup plant, a carrot wasp on Canada goldenrod, and a yellow masked bee on my hand (thanks Elaine and Dave for ID help!). Learning to identify pollinators is a great Delta-era activity, especially when it is too hot and dry out to plant baby plants.
Anemone canadensis in a boulevard garden planted in 2019
After something of an interruption in our normal CPP programming (see posts from 2020), CPP will be back this year, likely with several changes in format.
First, a little check-in on some gardens that we planted in 2017-2019.
A lot of CPP gardens planted in the last few years are looking really good! These pictures are from a quick walk around the neighborhood on May 26. Lots of plants have established well and will be looking spectacular in a couple weeks when summer blooming takes off. I am seeing a few bare spots, where a garden might benefit from additional plants (we’ve got tons of plants to distribute for this purpose this summer), as well as a few gardens that are already getting crowded or where one species (ahem, golden Alexanders) is trying to take over, where the garden might benefit from some thinning.
One gap that I noticed is that a lot of gardens are chock-full of midsummer and late summer blooming plants, but are lacking early bloomers that are so important for bumble bees as they start nesting in the spring. Plants like Jacob’s ladder, columbine, baptisia, wild lupine, Virginia waterleaf, Virginia bluebell, wild geranium, prairie smoke, pussytoes, and Canada anemone would be awesome to add wherever we can. The photo above shows a beautiful combination of the early bloomers golden Alexanders and large-flowered penstemon.
Large-flowered penstemon in full bloom (photo by Jim Proctor)
Another gap I’m noticing is grasses and sedges. Several more-experienced botanists and landscape designers have talked about the usefulness of grasses and sedges to regulate the competition in a perennial planting and provide textural contrast (they also have direct benefits to pollinators). Last summer I got my eyes reset when I did a botanical survey in a remnant prairie–there are so many beautiful species of grasses and sedges in the prairie, and their presence under the prairie flowers doesn’t need to detract from the density of blooms. Many of prairie grasses are clump-forming and low-statured, so they don’t look out of place even in a garden that’s trying to be somewhat formal.
Junegrass blooming in a boulevard garden surrounded by other prairie plants.
In my garden the junegrass is blooming, and it looks so beautiful. This plant stays short and upright with delicate leaves and fluffy flowerheads. Other grass species that we’ve been experimenting with the last few years include prairie dropseed, little bluestem, side-oats grama, blue grama, and bottlebrush grass. This year I’ve also got a flat started of the distinctive porcupine grass, which has hard, leathery, ribbon-like leaves.
One other thing I wanted to mention in this post is jumping worms. CPP started via the sharing of plants from established gardens. Unfortunately, we’ve got to start being way more careful about this practice now that invasive jumping worms have arrived in Minneapolis. These worms are super destructive in gardens as well as natural areas, causing so much soil disturbance that they uproot plants and create entire bare areas. We definitely do not want to spread them by sharing plants with contaminated soil. Luckily our friends at Wild Ones have been sharing lots of resources about how to identify jumping worms and how to keep from spreading them. For more info, check out the Wild Ones presentations on jumping worms.
Finally, a couple pictures of baby plants that are to be planted this summer. We are growing about 50 species this year and also were able to get 8 garden kits using leftover funds from our Lawns to Legumes grant. Don’t you want to add some to your garden?
That’s all for now, please get in touch with questions, comments, requests, or to volunteer. Happy summer!
This year, despite everything, our extended CPP community did an amazing job getting thousands of native plants in the ground, making a home for wild nature in the city and building connections with each other. Here are some pics highlighting our hopeful moments in a very tough year.
We grew 100 species of native plants from seed, took care of them all summer, and made them into garden kits.
2. More than 50 neighbors in Corcoran, Phillips, and beyond adopted these kits–totaling about 6,000 plants!–and used them to create new pollinator gardens, or to expand existing pollinator gardens.
3. We also partnered with Metro Blooms and CNO on a Lawns to Legumes demonstration neighborhood grant, which provided professionally-designed pollinator gardens along with native trees and shrubs to 30 residents of Corcoran and Phillips. The grant included funds for a brand new pollinator garden tool library (including a sod cutter!) housed in CNO that will be available starting in 2021.
4. In a freaky coincidence, towards the end of the summer we found a nest of endangered rusty patched bumblebees in the steps of Daniel’s new house. This is one of only a few rusty patched nests ever found in MN. UMN Bee Lab scientists were able to observe the nest to gain crucial conservation knowledge about the species.
5. By November it was time to mix up a batch of potting soil to start seeds for next year. We’re using space at Squash Blossom Farm to start the seeds once again.
6. For 2021 we’re focusing on short-statured and early-blooming species, as well some interesting trees and shrubs like prairie wild rose, bladdernut, and wafer ash (seeds pictured above). We got lots of seed from Prairie Moon using L2L grant funds, and we also collected some seed from mature gardens we’ve planted in the last few years, from the demonstration gardens at the Bee Lab, and from seed collecting days with The Prairie Enthusiasts.
As I write this, these seeds are starting their journey to becoming beautiful plants that will feed and shelter our insect buddies and provide all manner of quantifiable and unquantifiable benefits to our lives. We can look forward to lots more planting soon.
xo SN
Brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis) on meadow blazing star (Liatris ligulistylis). (Thanks to Elaine Evans for bee ID)
CPP is composed of friends and neighbors who care about the world and want to contribute to the flourishing of life in our corner of south Minneapolis. We had been ramping up for a huge gardening season this year, but of course we’ve found our priorities shifting and our capacity to think about gardening limited in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, which occurred just a mile from Corcoran neighborhood. We have been plugging into many different community efforts and thinking and talking about how this group can contribute to environmental justice in the short and long term.
This year we are partnering with Metro Blooms and Corcoran Neighborhood Organization to offer pollinator garden installation help and plants in Phillips neighborhood in addition to Corcoran. We’ll be creating a pollinator tool library at the CNO community garden so that anyone can install their own garden, and will be offering free workshops with professional designers to everyone in the neighborhood. Folks who live in Phillips or Corcoran can sign up here. This expanded set of offerings is enabled by the Lawns to Legumes neighborhood demonstration grant which we received this year in parnership with Metro Blooms and CNO.
In the meantime, the thousands of plants that we planted this winter continue to grow.
Last weekend, 14 of us convened at Squash Blossom Farm to start about 7,000 native plants that we will use to create new pollinator gardens next summer.
First we filled the trays with a mix of compost, pine fines, pearlite, and vermiculite.
Then we added seeds. We mapped out eight different tray designs for different environmental conditions (sunny/shady and wet/medium/dry), with 10 species in each 50-cell tray. This will let us have a ready-to-plant “garden” in each tray. Some of the seeds are seeds we collected in the neighborhood and some are seeds we bought from Prairie Moon Nursery.
We put the filled trays outside to stratify for the winter. We will bring them back into the greenhouse in the early spring to give the plants a little head start to hopefully grow big enough to transplant by June.
Thanks so much to everyone who came! And to Laura G. for boss soil mixing and photo-taking and Susan W. and Roger N. for donating the space and making us lunch!
Corcoran Pollinator Project 