In October and November of 2025, we planted two boulevard gardens, gave away several hundred plants, and started seeds for 2026! See below for some photo highlights.
On November 22, we planted 3,000 plugs of native seeds to cold stratify outdoors this winter in our neighborhood native plant nursery. We planted about 35 species, with many of the seeds collected from nearby CPP gardens. We focused on short and showy species that grow well in boulevards, such as butterfly milkweed, dotted bee balm, and thimbleweed. We used potting soil and seed starting trays purchased with funds from our Hennepin County Good Stewards grant.
On October 12, we planted CPP garden #43, a large, highly diverse boulevard garden at B’s house using a mix of CPP nursery plants and plants purchased from Minnesota Native Landscapes using our Good Stewards grant funds. Afterwards, we held a plant giveaway to find homes for the remaining plants.
On October 5, we planted CPP garden #42, a boulevard garden at Karen’s house.
Great job to everyone who came together to create habitat in the neighborhood this year!
On July 26, we gathered at our native plant nursery (generously housed in Casey’s yard) to weed the baby plants we started last December and give them more space to get large for our fall garden installations. We have about 25 species that made it through the winter and should be the perfect size to plant in September–lots of pollinator garden classics like bee balm (Monarda fistulosa), mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum), and anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), and some more unusual species, like prairie rose (Rosa arkansana) and prairie onion (Allium stellatum).
As we wait for the plants to mature, we’re looking for folks in Corcoran and surrounding neighborhoods who’d like to receive a community-installed pollinator garden (in exchange for helping install two other gardens). Let us know if you’re interested!
On December 1, 2024, we wrapped up our community projects for 2024 with a seed starting party. Despite the extreme cold (high temp of 18 degrees), we had 14 hearty souls join us to moisten potting soil, fill our new reuseable “conetainers,” and start about 30 species of native seeds that will become plants for CPP gardens in 2025. We also sent people home with seeds, soil, chicken wire cages for the native trees and shrubs we supplied this year, and beautiful CPP lawn signs designed by Charlie Zieke with logo by Sophie Strosberg. (Get in touch if you live in Corcoran neighborhood and need one for your CPP garden!) Many thanks to the Hennepin County Good Stewards grant, which enabled all of our purchases and workshops this year!
A few more photos from our seed starting day:
And other highlights from this year:
1. On September 28 and October 5, we planted four boulevard gardens (CPP gardens #38, 39, 40, and 41) for Corcoran neighbors Aerin, Roula, Andrea, and Matt. We used plants from the CPP nursery as well as some species from Minnesota Native Landscapes. About 30 friends and neighbors helped install the gardens. After the planting effort, we invited neighbors to come choose leftover plants from the nursery for their own gardens. We planted and distributed about 3,000 plants comprising 50 species.
2. In September we hosted a seed collecting workshop. We collected about 20 species of seeds from mature CPP gardens planted over the last 8 years. We used many of the seeds at our seed starting day.
3. In August, we distributed 38 native and near native trees, shrubs, and vines to Corcoran residents. We wanted to include native trees and shrubs as part of our offerings because they’re a great way of adding lots of pollinator habitat and nutrition without the labor involved in starting an entire garden of herbaceous plants, and because many trees and shrubs provide critical early-season pollinator resources for queen bumble bees. (For more on this topic, see this article by CPP friend and native bee taxonomist Zach Portman). This year, we distributed 12 species including elderberry, hazelnut, prairie rose, shrubby St. Johnswort, spikenard, wild plum, wild yam, Illinois bundleflower, nannyberry, halberd leaved rosemallow, red osier dogwood, and American bittersweet.
4. On August 11, we called on Charlie yet again to lead an irrigation workshop. We set up automatic irrigation for the CPP nursery and learned irrigation skills that any of us can apply to backyard gardens or nurseries.
5. In July, we hosted Metro Blooms lead designer Jen Ehlert to lead a garden design workshop that informed our garden installation at one of our garden recipient sites. We learned about species selection, plant spacing, site preparation, stormwater considerations, and how to take soil and light conditions into account when creating a pollinator garden.
And that catches us up to the last blog post. Thank you so much to everyone who helped us make urban pollinator habitat this year. Extra gratitude goes to Casey, who hosted every event and the new CPP nursery while creating a new human, Charlie, who helped us do all the things that we didn’t know how to do, Anne and Kim, who’ve been integral to CPP since the beginning and generally keep the neighborhood together, and Hennepin County for supporting this work.
Looking forward to the planting adventures of 2025!
Exciting news for this year, CPP was awarded a Hennepin County Good Stewards grant to plant several new pollinator gardens, expand our native plant nursery, share free native trees and shrubs, and offer four different workshops about native plants and pollinators. First things first: If you would like to receive a garden or plants, or attend an upcoming workshop such as our garden design workshop with Metro Blooms on July 30, email corcoranpollinatorproject@gmail.com. If you live in or near the neighborhood and want to receive a native tree or shrub, fill out this Google form.
On July 20, we had our first workshop of the year with Zach Portman, a taxonomist at the University of Minnesota Bee Lab. We identified native plants, bumble bees, and other native bees at several CPP gardens planted in past years. During our tour, we saw five species of native bumble bees, but on the way back to our cars, we spotted a sixth:
The endangered rusty-patched bumble bee! Zach was showing us how to inspect one of their favorite plants, red bee balm, for telltale nectar-robbing holes, when two rusty-patched bees buzzed over. This is the first time I’ve seen them in Corcoran neighborhood–must be a sign that all the gardens we’ve been planting have been helping to support them! (For more on how to ID them, check out this resource: https://beelab.umn.edu/rusty-patched-bumble-bee).
In other, less exciting (for us) news, earlier this year we learned that our project coordinators, Elissa and Phillip, were moving to New England. These two have been installing gardens with CPP since 2018 and had taken over coordination and plant propagation for the last several years (and helped turn basically their entire street into a continuous pollinator garden). Phillip and Elissa, we miss you and are so grateful for all your dedication to community and biodiversity!
This spring our inspiring neighbors Casey, Anne, and Charlie and Relle (of Corcoran neighborhood’s own Magic Acres Farm), have taken over lots of functions of keeping this work going. In June we moved the plant nursery out of Elissa and Phillip’s yard and into Casey’s yard:
It’s exciting to see the baby plants we started last fall growing and getting ready for their new homes.
Stay tuned for new workshop dates and plant opportunities. Looking forward to gardening with you!
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.
Corcoran Pollinator Project 