Gateway Greening Garden Class Volunteer

Information & Guidelines

Garden Class Program

What is Gateway Greening’s Garden Class?

Garden Class is an effort started in 2013 by Gateway Greening and SLPS to get students learning outdoors for an hour every week. Each participating school gets a dedicated Gateway Greening educator, who teaches garden-based science and other subjects. Classes have set times every week for the whole year—for example, 2^nd grade comes out to the garden every Wednesday at 2pm.

What are the benefits of Garden Class for students?

• Hands-on instruction in core curriculum helps students to better retain classroom teaching
• Increases student willingness to try fresh vegetables & fruits
• Gives students a sense of responsibility and care over other living things
• Cultivates students’ social and emotional skills, through sharing tools, cooperating on tasks, taking turns, and learning to express disagreement respectfully
• Introduces students to the joy of growing and eating healthy food!

How do we utilize volunteers?

Volunteers are critical to the success of our Garden Class programming. They help to provide the individual and small-group learning opportunities that appear in the garden, and assist with classroom management. They also bring their own unique skills—if a volunteer is an artist, a musician, or knows a lot about birds, for example, we love working to incorporate those strengths into our garden classes.

• We prefer that volunteers commit to consistently volunteering with the same classes for at least an entire season (Fall or Spring). For example, you could volunteer with 2^nd grade at 2pm every Wednesday from August-October. Some volunteers choose to assist the Gateway Greening educator for an entire teaching day every week—from about 10am to 3pm. However, we are flexible.
• To get more information on class schedules, and to set up a time to volunteer, contact us!
  • Carolyn Cosgrove Payne – (763) 227-1450 (Clay Elementary)
  • Punita Patel – (314) 560-8823 (Mallinckrodt & Cote Brilliante Elementary)
• If you are unable to make it, please make sure to call and cancel
• If you ‘no-call, no-show’ 2 times, you will no longer be eligible to volunteer with school gardens.

Ready to get started? Attend the youth volunteer orientation on November 11th from 12pm-1:30pm at Gateway Greening’s Main office. 2211 Washington Avenue, 63103.

Why are school gardens good? One can wake up everyday with a new reason for why they are an invaluable school and community resource. Even then, through the summer, most school garden go fallow. Do you wonder what you could do for your school garden?

Mallinckrodt School Garden is a good place to turn to see what works and how they do it. The last four years, parents have used Signup Genius to divide up the work of weeding, watering and other garden maintenance issues. Parents are encouraged to come and harvest the produce even if they are not helping with garden maintenance. Last year they had a free yoga class in the evenings for school families and also invited people from the community. This year they have a Farmers’ Market that students set up across the street at Gathesemane Lutheran Church on Sunday mornings. Students who are able to participate learn how to make change, how to set prices, if and when to lower the prices and how to make the customer’s experience meaningful. The money they raise goes to buying the garden journals that a few teachers are using as a tool for outdoor education.

Mallinckrodt School has also developed partnerships with area universities to use the garden as a platform for student teaching and learning. Fontbonne University’s dieteticts students help with the farmers market during the summer and bring nutritional classes to the students during school year. SLU biology students come with Dr. Gerardo Camillo to study native bees in the garden. This team’s excitement and enthusiasm around bees rubs off like pollen on to the school community. Students and teachers always end up learning the most fascinating things about the bees from them. Gateway Greening is another community partner of the school garden. We focus on doing year round education around the garden and work with teachers to provide needed support. Dig It crew – High school Youth Employment Program of Gateway Greening- helped with a lot of weeding and maintenance to keep the garden looking great this summer.
Key to Mallinckrodt Garden’s success is the fact that people have many reasons to come to the garden for a meaningful experience. What can you add to your garden to make it a meaningful place?

How can it already be the last week of Dig It?! We had a great field trip to Earthdance Farms with a whole bunch of different teen farm groups last Wednesday. 

We harvested cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, and tomatillos– summer weather is here at last! It was Emmanuel’s first time tasting a cherry tomato:

On Friday, we spend the whole day preparing for our end-of-summer Family Night. We cooked an enormous meal with 3 different chefs– roast chicken with bacon, corn, and mashed potatoes, kale salad, squash and onions, and peach pie. We made flower bouquets and practiced speeches. Despite the sticky, hot weather, we had a great turnout and everyone enjoyed themselves.

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.