Metro Blooms Rain Garden Workshops meet MS4 Requirement

July 16, 2008

Meet your public education and outreach MS4 requirement by partnering with Metro Blooms to offer rain garden workshops to your residents.

Metro Blooms, formerly Minneapolis Blooms, is a nonprofit educational and membership organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the environment. Since starting our rain garden workshops in 2005, Metro Blooms has partnered with various cities, watersheds and counties to have over 2,600 Twin Cities residents attend our educational workshops.

It is our organizational goal to ensure that all rain garden workshop attendees receive enough knowledge and resources to successfully install a rain garden on their property. That is why our rain garden workshop program contains five parts.

The first part in the series is a two-hour, large-group Educational Workshop (Part A) that will teach landowners how to install a rain garden, and give all attendees a do-it-yourself method. Rusty Schmidt, a Minneapolis landscape ecologist, is the key presenter. He has designed and maintained a wide range of rain gardens and bio-retention areas throughout the United States. With Dan Shaw, he's authored Plants for Stormwater Design and The Blue Thumb Guide to Rain Gardens.

This workshop is followed by a small-group (Part B) seminar a couple weeks later that will help those who have attended the Part A workshop get individual help with their rain garden design. Metro Blooms Landscape Design Assistants and Master Gardeners answer individual questions about garden layout and plant selection during the two-hour seminar.

Workshop attendees also have the option to receive a personal onsite consultation on their property from our experienced Landscape Design Assistants (LDA). For a small fee, an LDA will come to their property and help with any specific design questions they might have. The program also contains special native plant sales for workshop attendees and native plant grant reimbursement for Hennepin County residents.

Through foundation and individual funding, Metro Blooms can spread costs to run this program and make it affordable for the cities, watersheds and counties we partner with. We can tailor the program to include only the educational workshop (part A) or both the educational workshop and coaching seminar (Part B). Metro Blooms staff handles all coordination aspects to running this program, including reserving a location, promotions and processing registrations.