Before it gets too far into June, I wanted to share with the world the success of MRCN's recent rain garden tour! It was held on Sunday, June 6, which (compared to the blistering heat mid-Missouri is currently suffering through) was an absolutely gorgeous day!
I had been incredibly anxious while planning this event, primarily because I had never planned a garden tour! However, this event was also the first of its kind for MRCN; while we have hosted rain garden tours in the past, the self-guided format I had opted to go with was new for us. My goal was to get more people involved and encourage them to mold the tour into something that best fit their needs and interests. I also really, really wanted to feature some of the great residential rain gardens that Columbians have created! While everyone has seen the gardens at Stephens Lake Park or Rock Bridge High School, not everyone has seen John Glenn's backyard!
By the way, John Glenn is not an astronaut. Just a super nice guy with a rain garden (which is pictured above).
6 homeowners volunteered to show their gardens for the tour. Most of them had worked with us on our grant project last year, so it was fun seeing how the gardens had changed! I was so excited to have so many homeowners featured, as I was hoping they would inspire other potential rain gardeners. In order to emphasize even more person-to-person rain garden interaction, we also selected 4 public sites that are really great and had volunteers sit at those to answer questions during the tour. The remaining 6 sites were unattended, but I talked to quite a few people who visited them anyway.
The number of visitors at each site varied, from a total of 2 to over 30! My favorite "success story" came from homeowner Nadia Navarrete-Tindall and her husband Randy. She not only labeled some of the 120 native plants that inhabit her yard (shown below), but she also printed out a spreadsheet with the scientific and common names of all of them! I guess the word got out, because she reported that she had a steady flow of visitors for the full 3 hours!
When I first took on the rain garden project, I wasn't very enthusiastic about it, but after the tour, I am bummed I don't get to help plan another!
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