Eight years ago, Wendy Cotter, a parishioner at St. Edward in Bloomington, looked out the window of the church and saw that the parish garden had not yet been planted. She asked around and learned that an older couple who had been managing the garden felt they weren’t able to do it anymore.
So, Cotter and other parish garden volunteers took action. Together they created a weekly event to rally people to do planting, weeding and harvesting of vegetables. They named the event Wine and Weeding and have since been able to gather up to 20 volunteers every Wednesday from April through October. The vegetables they harvest are donated to a local food shelf in Bloomington run by an organization called VEAP (Volunteers Enlisted to Assist People).
This year, the garden took a big step forward when the volunteers pitched the idea of creating beds to lessen the amount of bending and kneeling needed to do the garden work. They recruited Randy Jenniges, a retired engineer, who built cedar beds earlier this year. The 1,350-square-foot garden now contains 32 beds, 15 of them elevated. It has made gardening much easier for the volunteers, whose ages go all the way up to 85.
Funding for the project came from the annual parish fall festival called Gather. Cotter, Molly Mitch, a parish trustee, Michelle Cowling and others helped to secure funding and carry out the garden expansion project this spring.
“We just had a great team,” said Cotter, a chair of the Gather festival. “We proposed it to the finance council and to the parish council and to Father (Tim Rudolphi, pastor of St. Edward) and all the trustees… . And they said, ‘Absolutely.’”
As of Aug. 13, the garden has yielded 116 pounds of vegetables, including beans, tomatoes, beets, carrots, zucchini, okra and tomatillos (known as Mexican husk tomatoes). In 2023, the garden produced 803 pounds, all of which went to the VEAP food shelf, which serves people in Bloomington, Richfield and Edina.
“This is what we wanted of our garden,” Cotter said of the Wednesday evening gatherings, which feature one hour of work, then food and fellowship — including wine — afterward.
“It’s a true community,” Mitch said. “Church means community. That’s the definition of church.”
