The Blue Thumb – Planting for Clean WaterTM program, still in its infancy, is up for its second award. The Blue Thumb program is an online outreach program with A to Z information to help residents plan and plant native gardens, raingardens and shorelines with native plants to help solve water quality problems. The website http://www.bluethumb.org features planting blueprints, a plant selector tool, local retailers and landscapers, grant information, how-to guides and videos, and more.

The 2007 Photo contest and calendar was a great sucess; we had many photo submissions. Please take a look at some of the past photo winners. The deadline for photo submissions is October 1, 2007.

Watershed District Receives Program of the Year Award, $45,000 Available to Residents in Rebates for Implementing Program

The Rice Creek Watershed District was honored with the 2005 Program of the Year Award by the Minnesota Association of Watershed Districts (MAWD) on December 2, 2005 at a state-wide conference. The Metropolitan Council also recently acknowledged the value of the watershed district’s program by approving a $45,000 grant that will go directly back to those who implement this native landscaping on their land.

The Rice Creek Watershed District is pleased to introduce the One-Stop Shopping to Restore your Yard and Shore program. Native plantings have many benefits over traditional gardens: they are lower maintenance, they can help with shoreline stabilization and they provide erosion control. Beyond these things, native plantings are quite beautiful. Because of all of these factors, there has recently been a renewed interest by homeowners and lakeshore residents in restoring their yards and shorelines. This program is intended to help these individuals with their projects and to get other people interested.

Visit the One-Stop Shopping to Restore Your Yard & Shore page

The quality of our lakes is very important, and as such, the Rice Creek Watershed District has maintained a monitoring program on many of our lakes for years. Now the data collected by the RCWD and that of the other groups involved with monitoring our lake water quality can be found on the Lakes page our website. Here in addition to water quality data, you can find general statistics on many of our lakes, and useful links from the DNR and PCA. In the near future, look for management plans and other links to appear in these pages.

The Rice Creek Watershed District and our consulting engineers (Emmons & Olivier Resources) have put together a number of resources for project managers to use in implementing Best Management Practices (BMPs) on their project sites. Because the practices detailed here are often unfamiliar to those in a position to implement them, these guidance documents and resources were assembled to properly plan and construct them as a part of a project.

Visit the BMP Information

Welcome to the Rice Creek Watershed District's new website and our new on-line address. You can now use ricecreek.org to find us in addition to ricecreekwd.com. Additionally, our new site will be updated more frequently, will contain more information, and will be more useful in general.

The Rice Creek Watershed District is announcing the “Enjoying the Outdoors” Photo Contest! Enter as often as you’d like by submitting photos taken within the boundaries of Rice Creek Watershed District that depict the theme “Enjoying the Outdoors.” Contest winners will be featured in the 2006 RCWD calendar, on the RCWD website and in various RCWD publications.