Our online store selling seeds, bulbs, and bareroots is open now — FIND IT HERE
Signup for in-person shopping is here. (Note: shopping times except during the volunteer pre-sale are now full unless someone drops their time. Sunday signup is not open yet, and is explained here).
The Friends School Plant Sale is a fund-raiser for the Friends School of Minnesota, a small Quaker K – 8 school in Saint Paul.
For the 2021 sale, we've made many changes for everybody's safety, and will keep updating the pages about this. There's a brief overview below, much more in the Doing the Sale section, or see the flyer we mailed in January explaining the changes (PDF, 1MB). We'll also add posts to the Blog section. One recent post is about how an outdoor sale will be different and another explains how to grow the mushroom kits and logs.
New—an extra day: Thursday, May 6
Friday and Saturday, May 7 and 8
Sunday, May 9
“Doing” the Sale
For more than 30 years, shopping at the Friends School Plant Sale at the Minnesota State Fair has been the great get-together for gardeners.
What will be different in 2021?
It will be outdoors
The sale will be in the huge parking lot that’s the Midway during the State Fair.
You'll need a reserved entry time to shop
To keep with public health guidelines, everyone will sign up ahead of time for an entry time.
Seeds, bulbs, and bareroots will be sold online only
Purchase them ahead of time. They will be sold completely separately from the plants at the Fairgrounds.
The sale will open a day earlier than usual and with extended hours. There will be no printed catalog — the updated plant list is online here as of March 1.
Find out more: Map and floorplan | What's new | COVID safety | Seeds & bulbs | Getting in | Checking out
Minnesota Water Garden Society
The Minnesota Water Garden Society is back!
They will be holding their sale separately nearby on the same days, just west of the Grandstand (where they were located during the 2019 plant sale). They will be selling plants that like wet feet, including a large selection of Lotus, waterlilies, bog plants, rain garden plants, just about anything that likes moist soil. Also available are a large selection of koi, shubunkin and goldfish, and carnivorous pitcher plants.
Registration is required to shop (separate from your shopping signup for Friends School Plant Sale). They will be open the same hours as Friends School Plant Sale. All sanitary safety precautions will be in place, including hand-sanitizing stations, mandatory masks for volunteers and shoppers, and limiting attendance to maintain social distancing.
Check out a PDF of their catalog HERE. Photos and descriptions of the plants can be found on their website.
Important News
No to neonic pesticides
The plant sale's planners have worked hard to make sure our plants have not been treated with neonicotinoids, common pesticides that are now suspected of killing bees and other pollinators.
- Read our full statement on this important issue.
- See our 2016 update on our neonic policy.
- Check out this statement about how our edible plants are grown.
- Watch a video made by our middle school students called "A Plea for Pollinators" about the neonic problem.
(Image: Bee on Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia. Photo by Michelle Mero Riedel)
