Day in the Life of an Idiot

 
Image: A seed event, which sounds potentially ominous to me for some reason.

Shawn will, periodically, text or email me things with all-caps headers like, "SIGN UP FOR THIS."  Earlier this week, under such a heading, she sent me a link to something called the MN SEED Project Seed Collection Event at Monarch City. Just as an aside, "Monarch City" also sounds to me like it's a side quest in some MMORPG. At any rate, as we are always trying to expand our native plantings, I dutifully did just that.

Due to this absolutely fantastical name "Monarch City," I will admit that I expected that we would be deep in some hidden urban wonderland, equipped with nets and colanders and gods know what else and told to buddy up and Never To Step off the Path. Instead, when I arrived at the West Minnehaha Recreation Center, I realized that I was looking at a park that I drive by nearly every Saturday morning on the way to the recycling center. It's just a park? Like, the majority of this space is grass, a baseball diamond, and it looks like an urban park, nearly anywhere in the world. EXCEPT. Apparently, along the fence edges are HUNDREDS of unique species of native wildflowers. 

I had, at one point, said to Shawn one Saturday morning many, many months ago, "Hey, I think those are native plantings," but I had no idea that this was an incredible resource for urban foraging for native plant seeds.  

Plus, the MN Seed collector folks had set up a table complete with packets of seeds that were up for the taking. I grabbed over twenty? What will I do with so many? My plan is two fold. First, Shawn and I are thinking about expanding our native plantings to the boulevard. We don't have a huge amount of sun, but one of the places we do is on the boulevard. Plus, I picked up some BIG plants, which I think would probably do best somewhere like the boulevard. We'll see. I have to figure out how to germinate these things, so we'll see. I did get some EXCELLENT advice at least, so it should be doable. 

At any rate, once a decent-sized group had gathered we got started. It will say that today is dark and drizzly, so there were probably only about ten of us total--and I feel like that included the MN Seed Project staff.  We were collecting mostly for the Project itself, although we were very much encouraged to take home small packets of seeds for ourselves. 


Image: Here's me, collecting some rudbeckia trilaba, a.k.a. brown-eyed Susans.

The work was fun. Strangely, so? As I was telling one of the other people in my grouping, this was the sort of thing I did, naturally, as a small child. I used to love to pull apart seed pods to look inside, or to take the little poppy seed pods and pretend they were pepper shakers. I could have stayed the full two hours, but I got very cold and it started to drizzle a little. I hope that they get a ton of seeds out of this event. 

The other fun I had was learning about a new app called iNaturalist and wandering around the newer plantings and taking pictures of many of the flowers still in bloom. (These were planted later in the season and so were a little late blooming.)


Image: prairie coneflower


Image: This one was a favorite, blue sage (salvia azurea.)


Butterfly weed pods

I took a lot of pictures of other native plants, but I won't bore you with them. If you live in St. Paul, MN, however, I will suggest that you stop by and check out Monarch City (685 W. Minnehaha Ave Street, 55104). You will probably be like me at first, where I was like, "Where? Where is this CITY???" because it really doesn't look like much at all, but just park your car and stroll along the fence line and you will begin to see.

I was excited to hear that the Frogtown Green Association is trying to get permissions to plant natives all up and down Pierce Butler Route in an area they've dubbed, "The Bee Line," in part because it is already home to the endangered rusty-patched bumblebee.  I foresee a lot of volunteer opportunities in my future.