Over 100 Saint Paul youth will have the opportunity to connect to the Mississippi River, bluffs, and floodplain forest close to home this summer, thanks to a partnership between the City of Saint Paul, the YMCA, and the National Park Service. The team is developing a day camp program at Hidden Falls Regional Park as part of Saint Paul’s Cities Connecting Children to Nature (CCCN) initiative, which aims to address barriers to outdoor experiences. These barriers are disproportionately felt by communities of color and low-income families, so scholarships will be offered to qualifying youth through local youth-serving organizations to make the camp more accessible. Saint Paul Natural Resources will provide planning assistance, environmental education, and volunteering opportunities as part of this one-week pilot program. Other organizations, such as Tips Outdoors Foundation and Wilderness Inquiry, will offer fishing and canoeing. If the pilot is successful, the camp will expand to serve more youth in the coming years.
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For over fifteen years the Blooming Saint Paul Program has been an avid employer of youth employment initiatives. The Right Track Program, launched in 2014, connects Saint Paul youth with meaningful training, work, and career exploration opportunities so they are better prepared to thrive in the workforce. Each year, our program hires up to twelve youth that assist with gardening and landscaping initiatives throughout the Downtown area of Saint Paul. The program not only helps prepare them for the workplace, but also it teaches them valuable skills in horticulture and gardening. The youth are exposed to a variety of knowledge and taught several skills from how to properly plant flowers, to what is the perfect mulch depth, to learning about plant biology and how they thrive! Our horticulture academy teaches the youth everything from cold hardiness zones, what is a perennial vs. annual, native plants vs cultivated plants, soil wellness to choosing ecologically and pollinator friendly plants that help keep our bees, butterflies and birds happy!
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Saint Paul Forestry has begun its annual planting of city boulevards. Trees are planted from April through June and again in October and November. Planting occurs over these months as to avoid the harsh summer heat that can lower the rate of survivability in newly planted trees. Saint Paul plants its boulevards on a rotation; every planning district is planted once every five years. About 1,500 boulevard trees will be planted in 2017. This year, Districts 2, 6, and 9 will be planted (Figure 1).
Forestry is working to diversify Saint Paul’s urban forest by planting a wider variety of species. Species diversification is advantageous because it improves the urban forest’s resiliency to climate change and invasive species. Below is a chart (Figure 2) that shows the various percentages of tree genera planted along city boulevards this year.
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We had another successful year of cleaning up our parks! It was our 31st Annual Citywide Spring Cleanup and we had another huge turnout. On Saturday, April 22 volunteers from across the City of Saint Paul came out to help beautiful their parks and streets by picking up trash uncovered after the snow melted. Thank you to everyone who participated!
A special thanks to our community partners who served as Site Hosts for the event: JCI St. Paul, Northern Tier Family of Companies, Conservation Corps of Minnesota & Iowa, College Nannies and Tutors, Frogtown Green, Friends of Hamline Park, Right Track and Summit-University Planning Council. Thanks to our sponsors: Chinook Book, SuperMom, St. Paul Bagelry and Peace Coffee.
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Take a walk through a natural area here in St. Paul and you are likely to find a number of oak species (like bur, red, and white oak) and their diverse leaves blanketing the ground. You might find a lonely oak amongst grasses and forbs, or a denser oak forest. The oaks and other plants historically found in the oak savanna and oak forest communities depend on periodic disturbance, usually fire, which slows the establishment of hardwoods. Without disturbance in an oak savanna, for example, hardwoods will encroach and shade out the grasses and forbs that do not tolerate shade.
In 2017 volunteers and staff will be planting many oak trees in our parks! But why preserve and restore our oak savannas and forests? Well, oaks are really important to a lot of different organisms. Many people know that acorns are an important food source for animals - over one hundred species of vertebrates are known to eat acorns here in the US. But did you also know that deer will browse oak twigs and young shoots, that oak snags can provide great shelter for mammals and birds, and that oaks are a “pollinator friendly” plant? Over 500 species of butterfly and moth utilize oaks as larval food plants! They lay their eggs on oak leaves, and after emerging caterpillars will feed on the leaves. In this way, oaks help many pollinator species in the beginning life stages, providing habitat and food.
Restoring oaks in our parks can benefit us all, for their beauty and the habitat and resources they provide...even to pollinators!
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As of April 2017, nearly all of St. Paul ash trees are within the buffer zone of Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) infestation. This means that if you haven’t created a management plan for your ash tree already, this should be the year you determine a plan before it is too late. If you do so choose to manage your ash trees, consider hiring an ISA Certified Arborist who can offer the help you need. Find one at www.isa-arbor.com/faca/findArborist.aspx.
For a complete article with tips on the arborist section process visit the St. Paul Tree Advisory Panel’s April 2017 blog at: http://www.treeadvisorypanel.org/tree-reports.
In an effort to promote the many benefits of gardens and gardening, Saint Paul Natural Resources will be providing more garden education opportunities to people Saint Paul. Pollinator gardens, rain gardens, vegetable gardens, and other gardens can do great things for our city, and we want to make sure residents understand those benefits and how they can participate.
With the departure of Mark Granlund, former Arts and Gardens Coordinator, Saint Paul Natural Resources saw an opportunity to restructure that position and hired Mary Henke-Haney as an Education Coordinator to coordinate garden education programs and community garden activities on parkland.
Mary started working for Saint Paul Natural Resources in 2012 as a seasonal Natural Resource Technician for the Environmental Services program, and has worked for the Environmental Education Program since 2014.
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