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.