Urban Roots

05/27/2026

Help plant gardens on Arcade Saturday morning! Reach out to [email protected]. 🌸🌼🌻

Payne-Phalen Community Council

05/21/2026

WaterFest is "shore" to be great - see you there! 💧💦

Join us Saturday, May 30th from 11am-4pm at the Lake Phalen Park Picnic Pavilion to celebrate our clean lakes! With activities like canoeing, a fishing competition, and art-making, it's the perfect day to enjoy with your family. We hope to see you there💧

05/20/2026

Why do you like the foods that you like? What do they mean to you? What memories come from them? Are the ingredients easy to find? Your food identity revolves around your unique answers to these questions. Tell us about your food identity in the comments! 🍜🥪🥘

Also visit the comments for a link to our May blog post about food identities and a recipe for Rotisserie Chicken Laab from our Cook Fresh Program Coordinator Kajia. 🍋‍🟩

05/19/2026

Welcome back to updates!!

After weeks of planting in our shared Greenhouse we’re finally out in our gardens and starting our planting season! So far we had a ton of planting of onions and lettuce, however stay tuned for more of our planting! 

We visited our Rivoli Bluff’s gardens after months of winter, and started designing our freshly new children’s garden and beds! From fluffing up our new beds to making raised beds, all of our school interns worked so hard to come to the gardens even after school, PSEO, college, etc. our interns are dedicated to the work we do!

Last week, we also went to ( ) Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Planting event at the Division of Indian Work ( )! We had an amazing time listening to Robin’s storytime and being a part of their movement, “Plant Baby Plant”. What is their mission? Plant baby Plant mission is to build a grassroots movement of people taking meaningful, regenerative action to care for the Earth!!

Overall, all of our interns from the Market Garden program, Conservation Program, and Cook Fresh Program came along and thought the event was fun, exciting, amazing, and impactful. A ton of activities our interns looked forward to such as planting, seed collection, button making, native plant tea making, as well as book collecting and book signing from Robin Wall Kimmer!

We also went back to our Phoenix Market garden to do some weeding and planting, as it is our last summer with the garden! New development is happening to our garden, so as it is our last summer, we hope to take care of the land for its next caretaker! However, with all the time we have left with the land, we hope to honor it at the end of summer for all the care it has given us and our non-living family!

05/18/2026

Check out the many tree giveaway programs in the Twin Cities, including at Urban Roots! And visit the link in the comments if you'd like to learn more about our tree giveaway for select St. Paul neighborhoods. 🌳

https://minneapolimedia.town.news/g/coon-rapids-mn/n/376636/minneapolimedia-news-free-tree-giveaway-programs-expand-across-twin

Free tree giveaway programs are expanding across the Twin Cities as cities and nonprofits work to restore urban canopy, improve climate resilience, and promote environmental equity

05/16/2026

Today is , and what better way to celebrate than checking out our website to learn more about our free tree giveaway! We are beyond excited to bring back our tree giveaway for residents and businesses of St. Paul. If you or someone you know is looking to plant a tree, whether it’s a fruit tree or a larger shade tree, please visit our website at UrbanRootsMN.org/free-trees/ or check out the link in our bio. All you have to do is confirm that you live in our service area, browse our list of species, and fill out the request form. A staff member will then contact you to help you get the process started! 🌳🌲💚

05/14/2026

An update on what Cook Fresh has been up to:

🥪 Our friends at Marty’s Deli in NE Minneapolis hosted us for a behind the scenes look at how they run their deli. We learned how to make homemade focaccia and how to assemble our own sandwiches. Thank you for teaching us and sharing delicious food ☀️

🌱Cook Fresh is stewarding Urban Roots’ backyard space this spring. We learned about our plant neighbors & planted more native plants in the beds that we prepared. We were able to start many of these plants from seed in the greenhouse this winter!

05/08/2026

🌿 Updates🌿

💧Shout out to Maricella from for always being the best host! We had fun exploring the We Are Water exhibit and taste testing water from 3 different locations in Minnesota (Lake Superior, Minneapolis, and water from our own office) to see if we could tell the difference.

🌱 We visited the medicine garden at St. John’s hospital for a little spring weeding and clean up. It’s looking beautiful— lots of violets, ferns, and gingers right now. Then we stopped by our Native Seed Garden at Harvest Park to see other flowers that have awakened— Phlox, Jacob’s Ladder, Prairie Smoke, and Bluebells.

🍁 We’re starting a new art project together! A notebook that we intend to fill with textures we collect in places we visit. We do this using playdough to gather textures and then ink pads to stamp them. It’s an easy way to reuse materials while exploring the outdoors creatively.

05/06/2026

We'll be there, but with competition like baby goats, it'll be hard to make our tent the GOAT. Stop by to say hi anyway!

Baby goats and more will be at the Eco Fair on Summit!

What is the Eco Fair on Summit? It is:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧Family friendly
🌯Great food
🚲E-bikes
🐝Pollinator gardens
🚗Electric vehicles
☀️Solar installations

Join us 🌂 or ☀️ under the big tent!

05/01/2026

🌿 Updates🌿

Spring cleaning and always eating 🤣🍽️

🧹 It’s the time of year we start prepping our space for summer programming.

🐟 Camp style cookouts have become a regular — thanks to Coordinator Moua for always nourishing us with the fish he catches. This time we made Brown Trout and Hmong pepper dip + ate the quiche we prepped and froze from earlier this month.

🚮 We also soaked in the sun while picking up trash at Lake Phalen to honor Earth Day, tasted some edible plants we came across & ofc, we never skip a playground. 😁