09-02-2025
Garden center goes green(er)
The wind used to be a curse to staff at the Mustard Seed Landscaping and Garden Center just west of Chaska on Highway 212. Gusts regularly knocked over the containers of flowers, shrubs and trees, keeping employees busy setting everything upright again. But now, owner Mark Halla hopes to turn that meddlesome wind into a blessing by installing a wind turbine to power his business operations.
'This is a cool thing,' he said. 'It will power our whole facility.'
Halla's been researching wind turbines for the last eight years. 'It was clear we needed to do something [about the wind],' he ex-plained. 'So we thought what can we do to make it better?'
His answer was to try to harness the wind and turn it into energy for the garden center. The final parts for the 160-foot high tur-bine were delivered earlier this week. The windmill should be fully installed by the end of the week with a commissioning event set for 4:30-6:30 p.m. on July 14.
Halla says his turbine should be more productive than the city of Chaska's infamous one just to the east.
'Ours will spin more often,' he said cheekily. 'And it will spin in winter.'
The turbine's 160-foot steel tower is already in place behind the garden center. It sits on a 24-foot by 24-foot pad on top of two feet of concrete and 2,000 pounds of rebar buried seven feet deep. Its three piers are each three feet in diameter.
The 25-foot blades will be among the items delivered and installed this week. When completed, the turbine will spin at wind speeds of just 5 miles per hour. Its capacity will be 40 kilowatts.
That's a quarter of the capacity of Chaska's 160-kilowatt turbine, but Halla noted that sitting at 160 feet high, he'll catch more wind than Chaska's 80-foot high turbine does.
Halla expects to generate 120,000 kilowatt hours per year. His business uses around 100,000 kilowatt hours so he'll have a chance to sell 20,000 kilowatt hours back to the power company at the same rate he pays to buy it.
The turbine cost the business $200,000. Halla applied for and received both a federal grant and a rural electric grant that together covered 55 percent of the cost. He expects that the turbine will pay for itself within four years.
'The real joy is we're doing the right thing with renewable energy,' he said. 'We're setting the bar, leading the way.'
This isn't the Mustard Seed's first green initiative. They previously installed a geothermal heating and cooling system.
For their efforts, the company has been honored with a host of awards including the Minnesota Landscape Association's 2011 Friend of the Environment Award and the Minnesota Environmental Initiative's Partnership of the Year Award.
Halla hopes that their actions will encourage other businesses to do the same. 'If you're going to do things, do them right,' he said.
