The RCS Giving Garden

There are many ways to describe The RCS Giving Garden in Lake Elmo: it’s a teaching garden, a giving garden, a repurposed landscape, a pollinator haven, and an all-ages community service project.

The vegetable garden was started in 2009 by RCS, Inc. employees who would maintain the garden on lunch breaks and after work hours. That first year they donated 1,806 pounds of herbs & vegetables to the food bank at Valley Outreach in Stillwater.

Later the Washington Co. Master Gardener volunteers were asked to help cultivate the project, and soon invited groups of children and adults to come spend a morning learning about where their food comes from and the skills needed to grow and maintain a vegetable garden.

Children who come in the first week of summer help select the seeds to plant and choose from unusual options including purple carrots and black peppers. The groups who volunteer in the following weeks of June learn about watering and weeding the garden, and learn which insects are helpful and which insects can be called “pests.” 

Vegetables grown include zucchini, beans, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, raspberries, and herbs; as vegetables ripen children are encouraged to try eating a vegetable they haven’t tried before. The field trips often conclude with children enjoying slices of watermelon while they sit in the shade under an array of solar panels.

As the fruits, herbs and vegetables ripen the visiting children help harvest the vegetables and the produce is weighed and recorded in an annual roster. Annual end-of-year produce donations average between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds, with a record 3208 pounds donated in 2019. In the 10 years from 2009 to 2019 more than 27,500 pounds of fresh produce has been donated to the food shelf, which has refrigeration available and allows families to select their own food items.

Summer field trips include preschoolers and middle schoolers, local daycamps, scout troops, kids from church programs and adult coworkers volunteering with their employer. Discussion topics for the day might include how to plant from seed, health benefits of eating vegetables daily, the importance of pollinators, water resources and an explanation of the irrigation system, and how to make compost.

RCS, Inc started the Giving Garden to give help not only to those in need within the community, but also benefit future generations – if a child learns about where food comes from, perhaps they’ll make a commitment to make the world a better place.