Author: beanstalk

Hello. My name is Diamond Tyler. I am 17 years old and I will be a senior this coming August at Clyde C. Miller Career Academy. My favorite vegetable is broccoli. To be completely honest I am a contradiction to myself. I like to be safe but I always take risks, but that’s a different story. Let me tell you about this week’s journey.

On Wednesday, the Dig It crew and myself worked with Dean, who helps us with construction, on making compost bins. While working with Dean we use tools like drills, handsaws, clamps, tape measurers, and a whole bunch of wood and screws. The first time construction was brought to us this summer I honestly thought that I was going to hate it, but it turned out to be not so bad. It’s a great stress reliever. After all the hard work was done, we ate food that was prepared by two chefs and three Dig It crew members. We ate pork tenderloin, garlic mash potatoes, collard greens with chopped up bacon, onions, squash, and a lemon tart pastry for dessert. This was one of the best meals so far. When I ate this meal, it felt like home. Even though I didn’t eat the onions and squash because I’m not a fan of those vegetables, I know they had to be tasty

On Thursday, the Dig It crew split off into groups. I was in the red group this week, along with Myra, Emmanuel, and Michael. We were working with young girls that are in an organization called “Girls Inc.” We helped them weed their raised beds, play games, and read books. Many of them said they would like to be farmers after that experience. After, we went to Crown Center, which is a Senior Living building. This time we didn’t work with Happy Planters, a group of seniors who help with the raised beds. While we were there, we harvested carrots, basil, lemon basil, collard greens, peppers, beets, and cabbage. There was so much cabbage and they were so big that the scissors broke. We were in so much shock, it was hilarious. After that, we distributed what we harvested into 12 bags for the Happy Planters. We gave the remaining produce to the café within their building. The lady we gave it to was so excited that we brought it to her, she lit up and that put a smile on my face. It was an amazing feeling.

This week so far has been amazing. It has been so helpful and beneficial in so many ways. I was able to relieve stress while gaining more knowledge and experience. Working with Dig It has been phenomenal and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Last Wednesday we hosted 2 groups of volunteers at Bell Garden– one group from New Hope Presbyterian Church, and the other a group of teens from the Baden West Florissant Development Corporation. Dig It crew members Diamond and TaNisha gave great tours for those groups, and the rest of Dig It showed them how to use power tools to build compost bins. After that, we enjoyed a wonderful lunch from the garden. On Thursday, we worked at Clay Elementary pulling some nasty weeds, and in the afternoon we had a soils workshop. We sampled soil from around Bell Garden, did a ‘shake test’, and identified the different components in our soil. We did drainage tests for sand, clay, and organic matter, and learned why organic matter is so important! On Friday, we followed up this workshop by learning about the different plant families that garden vegetables and fruits belong to. Crew went through Bell Garden and labeled all the plants in the demo beds with their name and their plant family. Saturday we hosted a field trip with a Lincoln University after school program, another field trip at Mallinckrodt Elementary Garden, and did some maintenance tasks around Bell Garden.

This marked the official halfway point of Dig It! The summer is flying by. For the remaining month of the program, we are challenging our crew members to take the lead. Through our variety of daily tasks and team building activities, we have identified where our group works well together, and where we struggle. Now it’s up to the crew to turn the group’s challenges into our strengths.

This week at Dig It, we’ve been focused on reaching out and building new skills. Wednesday was our first day of power tools training and construction! Youth got a great start building many of the parts we need for the raised beds we’ll be awarding to gardens in the fall. We were delighted to work with Chef Josh on Wednesday as well, making a delicious watermelon salad and potato bacon braise with tons of veggies from Bell Garden.

Cote Brillante School Garden is located in North Saint Louis, the part of the town where most folks ‘south’ of Delmar choose not to go. A year and a half ago, I decided to challenge myself and started looking after this school garden. It has been a meaningful and also a very safe experience for my three young children and me. This spring a second grade and after school garden club did a lot of planting at the garden and loved every minute of it. We are asking for your help this summer to keep this garden alive by watering and weeding. The food grown here is donated to the neighborhood families and the neighborhood food pantry over the summer.

This garden is also on the Gateway Greening’s Youth Garden Tour this spring. Here is a link to sign up for the tour. This would be a great way to check out the garden. If you are interested please contact me and I would love nothing more than to show you around this garden.

If you would like to help with Cote Brillante Garden this summer, click here to sign up.

 

 

School’s out for the summer! What do school garden educators do over the summer, you ask? Well, this year we’re happy to report we’ll be running our pilot youth employment program, Dig It STL! 12 amazing young people, 2 crew leaders, and the education staff will all be working our tails off for 8 weeks, STARTING NEXT WEEK!, for the benefit of our community’s food projects. Dig It youth will be working with school gardens, senior gardens, City Seeds, and Bell Community Garden. They’ll be learning leadership skills, cooking, teaching kids, pulling weeds, getting a crash course in agriculture, and going on field trips, all while earning money (for a lot of them, it’s their first job!). It’s going to be sweaty, dirty, and inspiring. We just can’t wait to get started.

It’s the end of the school year! How is your garden program doing? Is it living up to the expectations of both the students and the teachers in your program? Are you teaching everything you set out to teach? One way to find out is to allow teachers and students to self-evaluate their time in the garden. To help you out, we’ve put up an example of our Teacher End of the Year Evaluation and our Student Pre and Post Test that we use with 2nd and 3rd graders. We encourage you to use them as springboards to make your own tools.

When the lettuce is starting to form heads, and the chive flowers are purple and poofy, we know it’s time to enjoy the fruits of our hard work! Here’s how we make salad with PK-2nd grade at Clay.

Supplies:

• tub or bucket for washing dishes
• tub or bucket for rinsing lettuce
• sponge(s)
• dish soap (biodegradable)
• clean, potable water (not from your rain barrels)
• low table for washing station
• low table for tearing-up and dressing-making stations
• reusable bowls or plates and forks for all students
• olive oil
• lemons, sliced in half (enough for every student to have half)
• salt
• pepper
• several large bowls and colanders
• non-latex gloves
• hand sanitizer

1. Set up wash station, ‘processing’ station, and eating stations ahead of time.

 
2. Give every student a squirt of hand sanitizer and tell them it’s time to make a salad!  Have them follow you to the bed of lettuce. They will want to grab the outside of the leaf and rip pieces off– show them how to follow the leaf all the way to the stem and pull off whole leaves. Instruct everyone to pick a certain number of leaves (for PK and K we do 3, and 1 and 2 we do 5, because they tend to eat more). They will be grossed out by the bugs crawling on the leaves.

3. Once a few kids have the full amount of leaves, have them follow you to the wash station and show them how to rinse off their leaves in water. Then show them where the processing station is.

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4. At the processing station, show them how to rip up the pieces of lettuce into bite sizes in the colanders. When colanders get full, give them one more rinse, and dump them into regular bowls. When kids finish tearing up lettuce, give them half a lemon to squeeze into an empty bowl. Tell them not to lick the lemon before they squeeze it (it will happen).

5. Send kids who are finished back to the garden to pick various edible flowers– we always have chive flowers and a few brassica flowers this time of year, and if we’re in short supply, i have the kids pick dandelions to put in. You can also have kids pick anything else that might be ready– radishes, baby turnips, beet greens, peas, herbs– to throw into the salad as well.

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6. You or another adult can mix olive oil, salt, and pepper into the lemon juice, and pour it over the salad that now has various accoutrements thrown in. Mix well. Then, have students all sit down. Have one student hand out forks and another hand out plates or bowls. One student can hold the salad bowl, and another can put on gloves and hand out just a little bit of salad to each student, to try. Enjoy!

I only give students seconds if they have completely finished their plates. As  you eat, you can talk about the different things students did to take care of the lettuce and other salad ingredients.

7. If you are using reusable dishes, have students toss their leftovers into the compost pile, and go back to the wash station with a tub of soapy water to wash their dishes. (you will want to re-wash them after they have gone back inside, but it is good practice for them).

Here’s a short and sweet lesson on soil and composting! This can be adapted well from 2nd grade all the way through high school, depending on how much students already know.

Start with the Earth Apple activity, which sets some great context for how little topsoil we have on Earth that we can actually grow food in. Then, ask students what they already know about the process of decomposition. Most students in upper elementary school will be familiar with the terms ‘producers’ (plants), ‘consumers’ (animals), and ‘decomposers’ (fungus, bacteria, invertebrates!). Explain that composting is just intentionally applying the natural process of decomposition to create soil more quickly from your food and garden scraps. Sing the ‘Compost Cake’ song from the Banana Slug String Band with younger students, to drive the point home. For older students, have them make short skits about how compost is created– it is hilarious to watch them pile on top of each other to simulate the compost pile.

Now that they know everything there is to know about compost, have students venture to your compost pile and use this worksheet to examine which organisms they are able to find. They are sure to find some truly creepy crawly bugs and gain a new appreciation for the ecosystem of living things in soil.