Fall planting season is upon us and we have plenty of trees and shrubs to get installed the next few months. Join us for one of our Saturday events in the Snoqualmie Valley to help restore salmon habitat!
Celebrating Earth Month (April) has come and gone and we wanted to reflect on all our accomplishments. Our volunteers are truly the ones who make our Snoqualmie Stewardship program such a success. We could not restore so much habitat without your help! This past April we worked with 430 volunteers. That is more than all of 2025 in total and we’re only halfway through the year! Volunteers helped us plant nearly 2,000 native trees and shrubs, restoring and maintaining 2.4 acres of riparian habitat on Snoqualmie Valley farms! Our newest Adopt-a-Buffer sponsor, the DLR Group, stood out by planting the most native trees/shrubs by a single group AGAIN. This year they planted nearly 600 plants at Wallace Acres! Thank you DLR Group and all of our amazing volunteers!
Spring has sprung at Salmon-Safe certified Carnation Farms and so have two new rain gardens! Over the past couple of months the Snoqualmie Stewardship Team has been planning, designing and installing two new rain gardens on the farm. They worked closely with Eric Popp, Carnation Farms Director of Regenerative Agriculture, to plan the location of the rain gardens. Eric even provided excavator training for the crew. These rain gardens will filter over 50,000 gallons of water a year and act as great demonstration gardens and talking points about stormwater management and the extra mile Carnation Farms is going to operate sustainably!
As a sustainable, Salmon-Safe certified farm our commitment to ensuring water quality runs deep. Because we recycle millions of gallons of water from our facilities each season, managing runoff is a daily concern for our agricultural operations. Rain gardens help us ensure we think about runoff holistically, beyond just what we use in our fields and facilities. Filtering water from our gutter systems through rain gardens ensures that we are mitigating our water quality impact on the greater environment surrounding the farm, ensuring the long term health of our ecosystem.
Eric Popp, Carnation Farms Director of Regnerative Agriculture
Be sure to visit Carnation Farms for their annual plant sale and Spring Market May 1, 2, 8 & 9! While you’re there stop by the rain garden and talk to Geoff Bough. He’ll be there providing stormwater management education and talking about the rain gardens. Check out all their upcoming events here: https://events.carnationfarms.org/events/
The Rose Family Foundation and King County Flood District provided Flood Reduction Funds for these projects.
Is there a better way to celebrate the gift of nature than throwing on your boots, grabbing a shovel and planting native trees and shrubs to restore fish and wildlife habitat? We think not, at Stewardship Partners! We have multiple projects for you to join starting at the end of March to celebrate Earth Month. Here are some examples:
3/28: Help us maintain the rain garden at Centennial Fields Park in Snoqualmie
4/11: Join The Boeing Company and us for a day of planting and maintenance at Sinnema Farm in Carnation
4/18: Visit our Green Stormwater Infrastructure and Habitat Restoration booth at the Duvall Earth and Arbor Day Festival! Enter to win a free rain barrel! No need to sign up, just show up!
4/22: Earth Day Extravaganza at Carnation Farms! We’ll be restoring the banks of the Snoqualmie River by digging out blackberry and planting native trees at a brand new restoration site on the farm.
4/25: Restoration site maintenance and planting at Changing Seasons Farm in Carnation!
For years now, Stewardship Partners has been working alongside local Snoqualmie Valley schools, libraries, municipal governments, and businesses to install green stormwater management features such as rain gardens, cisterns, and rain barrels. Back in 2021, we were awarded King County Flood Control District Flood Reduction Funds to install some signage and features (possibly a rain garden) in the city of Duvall. We teamed up with the City of Duvall and our old amazing friends, Luke & Sarah, at The Grange. The initial idea was to install a rain garden and some signage at the restaurant. After many iterations of planning and design drafts with our other friends at MxM Landscape Architecture we decided a biofiltration box would be the best option for the Grange site. We posed the idea to Luke and Sarah, and they loved it! We then worked with yet \more friends at Dirt Corps to purchase and install a beautiful prefabricated artful biofiltration box. The box was built and designed by Tabasco Mills of the Blacksmith Shop in Seattle. The installation of the box entailed clearing a space for the box, two different types of forklifts to move and place the box and staff from both Dirt Corps and Stewardship Partners! Postponed by flooding, the box finally had a new home at the Grange!
In addition, we have installed signage in these highly traveled areas that explains how the green stormwater management features work and why they’re so important to the community and environment. This is another prime example of Stewardship Partners collaborating with many partners and friends to accomplish our goals!
We had a wonderful Earth Month Kickoff Event with DLR Group out at Wallace Acres on April 2nd! The group helped us in our first stage of planting this HUGE project. We had 51 volunteers who planted a record 976 native trees and shrubs! That’s 1.5 acres restored in a mere 4 hours! And that’s not all. DLR became our newest Adopt-a-Buffer sponsor, so we’ll see them back a few times a year to plant and maintain the habitat buffers at Wallace Acres. Thank you DLR!
You too could get involved in restoring the Snoqualmie Valley! Group leaders of local businesses, organizations, and teams are encouraged to contact Chris LaPointe at cl@stewardshippartners.org to get connected to an event or to create an event that caters to your groups’ specific needs (such as a weekday event).
Mother Nature provides us with the land and water that sustains us all so roll up your sleeves, throw on your boots and grab a shovel to help us give back to her! Earth Month conveniently falls in the middle of planting season, so we encourage you to join us for one of our many events in the beautiful and bountiful Snoqualmie Valley this April. Individuals can sign up online right now. Groups leaders of local businesses, organizations, and teams are encouraged to contact Chris LaPointe at cl@stewardshippartners.org to get connected to an event or to create an event that caters to your groups’ specific needs (such as a weekday event). Scroll to the end of this email for a list of upcoming events!
We’d like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank all of our 2024 sponsors, in-kind donors, and volunteers that supported us throughout the year. Special shout-out to the hundreds of individuals who donated to Stewardship Partners or volunteered with Snoqualmie Stewardship! We look forward to partnering with you all in 2025.
Get involved in 2025! Our first volunteer event of the year will be held on Saturday, February 8th, 2025 10:00am – 2:00pm at Wallace Acres.
Join Stewardship Partners and Adopt-a-Buffer sponsor, University of Washington School of Dentistry’s Climate Action and Sustainability Team, for a day of planting native trees and shrubs at Wallace Acres! Wallace Acres is a historic dairy farm located between Carnation and Duvall, WA. Stewardship Partners has been restoring and maintaining the habitat buffers along the Snoqualmie River for more than a decade and recently was awarded funding to provide livestock exclusion fencing and to restore 3,000’ of riparian habitat.
On May 18th Stewardship Partners joined The Alliance for Pioneer Square and over 250 volunteers participating in multiple projects for their annual Spring Clean event. Our group was small but mighty as we maintained the four rain gardens on Occidental. We cleaned up the gardens, installed 30 plants and added mulch to top them off. There’s nothing more gratifying than creating a positive impact in your community especially in a spot you walk by each day. Thank you, volunteers!
