Dig It STL is Gateway Greening’s teen employment program where teens work for eight weeks on building knowledge about urban agriculture, food access issues, and community leadership.
On Dig It STL’s first day the team played a game where they had to name another team member when a blue tarp was lowered between them. The team, initially shy, warmed up as they raced to shout an opponent’s name as soon as their head peeked over the tarp. While the game is fun and spontaneous, it also serves a vital purpose in helping the crew begin to feel comfortable with each other.
The teens come into the program unfamiliar with each other and with a variety of interests. Some teens come into the program passionate about the environment and wanting to save the world. Others are interested in plants and growing food. And many want to learn public speaking and leadership skills.
Alana, a crew leader for Dig It STL.
First Week
In the Dig It STL program, the teens learn about all of these things and more. During the first week of the program the crew created a community contract. This contract details the ways they will treat each other and themselves. They also did a variety of icebreakers and team building activities so that the crew can begin to bond.
The program includes frequent workshops that focus on environmental, interpersonal, and farming skills. They range from Soils 101 to learning how to give a great elevator speech.
“My favorite part is the workshops because you get to see environmental science concepts applied to agriculture,” said Joe, a Dig It STL crew leader.
The teens also receive feedback from staff and other fellow crew members during an exercise they call “straight talk.” During straight talk, the teens also cultivate emotional intelligence by reflecting on their own progress and goals.
But it’s not all workshops and team building for the Dig It STL teens. They also take field trips to local farms, gardens and organizations. Joe says that he is particularly excited to visit Flower Hills Farm, a sustainable and organic flower farm. The field trips are designed for teens to learn more about sustainable agriculture. They also get to see the variety of opportunities available to them in the field.
Daily Work
However, most of the work that the teens do revolves around keeping the Gateway Greening Urban Farm running. They do a lot of weeding, watering, and harvesting, as well as learning the practices required to keep an urban farm running. These practices include irrigation, natural pest control, and crop rotation.
Drachen, a Dig It STL teen, weeds.
All of this knowledge will aid the crew as they perform their final project as Dig It STL members, a teen led harvest. This will be the first year that the program will culminate in a teen led harvest. This will ensure that the teens both understand sustainable agriculture practices and have gained leadership skills through the program.
“The harvest will allow the teens to use the leadership skills they’ve gained, as well as use their knowledge about agriculture in a self-directed way,” said Carolyn, teen programs coordinator.
Program Goals
Ultimately though, building a loving community in which the teens can learn to both respect others and themselves is the goal of the program. Building community is vital in creating a city where people can collaborate to eliminate hunger and inequality. Within a loving community, it is possible to address these large issues because people are committed to the mission and each other, regardless of individual differences that could otherwise cause division and fragmentation.
Though not all of the teens will become best friends, that’s not the point. Fostering redeeming goodwill for all does not require friendship or affection, just commitment to improving the city and community one lives in. And solving issues like hunger requires such a commitment. Food and the natural world create connection.
And no one says that better than Alana, a crew leader of Dig It STL.
Malaak, a Dig It STL teen, harvests.
“When you bring people together in the outdoors, they bond.”
We added a high school internship program to Dig It StL, read more here:
This is the first year that Gateway Greening has offered a high school internship program, in addition to our summer teen employment program. Through the internship, local high school students explore environmental issues, the St. Louis food system, and local urban agriculture projects, all while earning school credit.
Dig It STL Interns ask: “Why are you tilling the Farm beds?”
In October 2016, high school seniors Adam and Anna started their internships with Gateway Greening through the Dig It STL program, spending a large portion of each week throughout the fall and spring semesters of their senior year working on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm. From researching and creating a crop rotation plan for the coming year, to getting outside and performing hands-on tasks, they were an incredible help.
As Adam and Anna learned about soil structure and different soil management practices during their internship, they asked Teen Program Coordinator Carolyn Cosgrove-Payne: “why do we till the vegetable beds on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm?” As an urban agriculture organization, Gateway Greening teaches about no-till practices in our curriculum and discuss the benefits of no-till for microbial activity, soil fertility, and carbon sequestration.
However, we have never tried using no-till soil management practices on our own urban farm. When challenged with the question, the staff thought about it and realized the main reason we haven’t tried no-till is… inertia. Gateway Greening has never directly used no-till and things seemed to be working fine, so it never entered our minds.
As part of the Dig It school-year program, interns are required to complete a culminating project that demonstrates some of the knowledge they gained during their time with Gateway Greening this spring. Adam and Anna chose to put forth a No-Till Proposalfor the Gateway Greening Urban Farm as their culminating project. The rest this article shares Adam and Anna’s findings and research, in their own words.
The Process, Pros, and Cons of No-Till Farming
by Adam Mancuso & Anna Dotson
Traditional farming practices utilize tilling when preparing to plant new seeds in the ground. This is done in several ways, from large machinery to handheld tools, but the goal is the same: to loosen and aerate the soil in order to make it easier to plant and introduce nutrients. However, this process not only interrupts the natural soil building process that is occurring during the growing season, but also is not effective at reaching its goal, on account of smoothing over, crusting, and loss of the soil that occurs after heavy rainfall. This is why some farmers choose to instead use no-till practices on their farms, to maintain and boost the natural processes present, depending in part on what kind of soil is present on their farm. While till farming builds up the soil (using compost, pesticides, fertilizers, etc), tears it down, and builds it up again, no-till farmers instead continuously build up the soil throughout the year.
In 2017, Hen bit and Chamomile did their best to invade raised berms on the urban farm.
There are a few things that go into a no-till bed or field. The first thing that needs to be done when preparing a no-till bed is to plant cover crops over the winter then use a roller or crimping tool to kill the cover crops once the growing season is 1-2 weeks away. After this is done, tarps should be put over the beds to cover them until planting time. If a roller or crimper is not used, then this process should be started 2-3 weeks in advance rather than 1-2. Once it is time to plant crops, add in about 4 inches of mulch during the initial seeding along with compost around the plants, making sure to pull the mulch away from the stems of young plants as they start sprouting. If there are perennial roots from other plants present in the soil, be sure to remove these from the areas being planted in so they do not come up and disrupt the growing of the plant that is supposed to be growing. Minimal watering through drip irrigation is the best way to water no-till spaces, and an important thing to keep in mind during the entire process is to compact the soil as little as possible. Compacting the soil is counterproductive as one of the goals of no-till farming is to build up the soil structure, however there is preliminary research that shows that soil in no-till systems are better at recovering on its own from compaction than soil in systems that use tillage. Growers also need to be mindful of any small weeds that may start to grow and to gently pull them out before they form large root systems.
Pros of No-till Farming
There are several pros when it comes to no-till farming over till farming. One of the main positives cited is very good erosion control, along with conservation of soil moisture and a buildup of organic material within the soil. No-till helps with erosion because the bulk of soil erosion in till farming comes from the tilling action itself, and because in no-till farming plant residue is left on the beds, the organic material builds up and helps with holding soil moisture and naturally promotes aeration and earthworm population increases (along with beneficial microbial life). Because in no-till the soil remains undisturbed, this also reduces the chances of accidentally bringing dormant weed seeds to the top of the soil (where they will then sprout), along with helping the soil to hold more carbon than it releases. No-till farming also has a hand in reducing loss of phosphorus in the soil. On larger farms, cutting out tillage also helps to cut out large amounts of fuel cost from the budget. In the long term, no-till helps provide larger yields during years without much rain while also helping farms save on water costs.
Left: No-till bed. Right: Till bed planted with the same crop.
Cons of No-till Farming
Because building up soil structure is a slow process, there are certain benefits that can take up to 6 years for the effects to be seen at all. Another con to no-till is that there is no incorporation within the soil, meaning that compost added to the top of a bed stays on the top and the materials in it do not go far beyond that layer if root systems and/or microbial life do not transport them. In addition to the lack of incorporation, a con of having high organic matter content is that the organic matter ends up holding the soil together, which, if there is a poor earthworm count (or other microbial life), will not be broken up which can result in packing in of the soil and that could make it harder for plants to thrive in the soil. The increased ability for the beds to hold water is a bit of a double-edged sword as well, meaning that while holding more water is useful in terms of water costs and plant survival in dry years, in wet years the beds can end up over-saturated which then can result in slow warming in the soil if there is poor drainage. Poor drainage in no-till areas are typically caused by compaction of the soil. This can be solved by minimal use of “vertical tillage” to break up small areas of the soil that were previously compacted.
Project Conclusion
Two major parts to the no-till farming system is incorporating crop rotation and cover crop into the farming schedule, two things that are already being done at Gateway Greening. The main aspects that need to be increased are the amount of mulch and compost used. No-till farming increases soil structure, ability to hold water, and reduces soil erosion over time and is therefore a positive system for Gateway Greening to adopt.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln | Web Developer Network. (n.d.). Advantages and Disadvantages. Retrieved February 20, 2017, from http://cropwatch.unl.edu/tillage/advdisadv
Dig It STL 2017 Interns installed new beds in the Demonstration Garden made from upcycled materials found in the local community.
This week, our first year of Dig It school year internships came to a close as our interns graduated from high school. In the 2016/2017 school year, our crew of 16 seniors from McKinley, Collegiate, and Soldan high schools racked up a cool 560 hours of service on the Gateway Greening farm, and they can see the impact. The garlic they planted in the fall is almost ready to be harvested, the fruit trees they pruned are filled with tiny green cherries, plums, and peaches, and in the words of one intern, “It’s sad we have to leave just when it’s getting good out here!”
Our teens explored a wide range of topics this year, including hunger and food insecurity, no-till soil management, medicinal herbs, and food policy. This highlighted the interdisciplinary nature of urban agriculture, and the connections between our farm and the diverse fields of ecology, biology, food science, public health, and business or nonprofit management. These are topics many teens don’t even know they’re interested in! One intern said, “I just signed up for this internship so that my friend wouldn’t be the only one at the info session, but Dig It has been interesting and fun and had made me more interested in environmental farming.”
Working on the farm also allowed interns an opportunity to reflect on their own health and habits. During our last-day reflection, many of our interns said they felt inspired to eat more fresh foods after this experience, and to seek out food grown organically, despite the fact that healthy eating was not a topic we explicitly covered. Some students came to the farm right after a difficult chemistry class and expressed how relaxing and peaceful it was to be able to spend part of the day outdoors, a feeling substantiated by research on green space and mental health.
Just as the soil food web in this no-till bed interns researched and implemented supports a spinach seedling, may the web of connections and experiences students had on the farm support them as they grow.
Work-based learning programs like this can result in higher lifetime earnings and better postsecondary outcomes for youth, and we are incredibly grateful to the Career and College Readiness team at Saint Louis Public Schools for their support. However, Dig It STL school year internships benefit Gateway Greening as well. We have the opportunity to train the next wave of nonprofit staff and citizens that will keep our St. Louis food projects running for the long haul. Young people who never would have sought us out on their own have the opportunity to realize that they are interested in our mission. Even if our interns never set foot on a farm again, we hope we have cultivated an affection for land and food that sticks with the students for life.
PS: We’re excited that two of our school year interns, Adam and Caroline, were hired onto the summer Dig It STL crew! Stay tuned for more when the Dig It STL summer session kicks off on June 14th.
Written by Carolyn Cosgrove-Payne, Teen Programs Coordinator
Interns from Soldan International High School painting row signs for the Gateway Greening Urban Farm.
The appearance of April on the farm coincides with the mysterious disappearance of sufficient hours in the day.
Dig It kicked it into high gear last week, cutting, assembling, and painting 96 wooden signs to mark the beds on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm. What we thought might take two days turned into four days of feverish cutting, drilling, and painting.
Dig IT STL intern Adam and AmeriCorps VISTA Genesis planting on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm.
A quick side trip with a few interns to plant half a bed of greens became several hours of aphid-squishing after we discovered the pesky pests had already invaded the seedlings. While we were there, we thought we’d check on the no-till bed whose cover crop surely would be nice and dead by now. Can you tell what part of the bed the holey tarp was on? Hint: it’s the part that still looks very much alive.
Cover crops that survived due to hole-filled tarps.
We re-crimped the cover crop, and found a long roll of black landscape fabric to replace the offending tarp. By then everyone was late, breaking into a slow jog to get the Gateway Greening Urban Farm cleaned and locked up.
Despite the frenetic pace of the final weeks of spring internship, the world right now is certainly mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful, as e.e. cumming wrote. Our interns are already asking about volunteering on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm after graduation, a suggestion that they too have caught the farming bug. I hear it’s pretty contagious.
Written by Carolyn Cosgrove-Payne, Teen Programs Coordinator
This is the first year that Gateway Greening has offered a high school internship program, in addition to our summer teen employment program. Through the internship, local high school students explore environmental issues, the St. Louis food system, and local urban agriculture projects, all while earning school credit.
Here at Gateway Greening, we’ve been talking about the Dig It STL internship program and sharing pictures for months. Yet many people still find themselves wondering – what do the teens that participate in Dig It STL do exactly? For those who are curious to see what a semester in the Dig It STL internship program looks like, here are the highlights of what these youth have been doing, from October 2016 to April 2017.
Dig It Interns from Soldan International High School spent a sunny day mulching fruit trees on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm.
October 6th: Plant Identification & Plant Families Workshop on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm.
October 18th: Healthy Soils 101 Workshop: We built a compost pile and tested our soil’s water-holding abilities and aggregation.
November 1st: Interviewed for TV by KMOX on the farm! We aren’t sure if the segment has aired yet, but it was pretty fun.
November 10th: Helping Forest Park Forever’s Nature Reserve Steward plant spring ephemerals in the forest.
November 22nd: Helping Farm Manager Jackson draft the crop rotation plan for the Gateway Greening Urban Farm’s next growing season.
December 8th: Mixing up a batch of Fire Cider to ward off the common cold, and learning about the healing properties of plants from Dani Gallagher of Roaming Soul Apothecary.
January 5th: Watching and discussing ‘The Garden’, the story of the South Central Farm, the largest community garden in the US (note: this is a great and educational film, but not a happy one! Tears were shed!)
January 12th: St. Louis Food Policy Council’s Melissa Vatterott introduced teens to the process of making policy in the City of St. Louis, and how policy affects food access.
January 17th: Dr. Ellen Barnidge and Dr. Stephanie McClure from St. Louis University gave our interns a crash course in hunger and food insecurity in our region.
January 31st: Our first planting- green onions!
Interns Anna and Adam taking soil samples on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm, as part of their no-till capstone project.
February 9th: One of the many days that Dig It helped Community Garden Manager Dean build beds, sheds, benches, and more for community gardens. Power tools are awesome.
March 1st: 12 interns from Soldan International Studies High School begin their 8-week internship.
March 9th: Dig It led a phenomenal tour of the farm for a funder.
March 16th: Helping out at Global Farms, a farm project for resettled refugees through the International Institute (we worked with them once a month all year).
April 4th: All no-till beds have had their cover crops killed and are tarped off- now we are just waiting for the frost date to pass so we can plant in them!
Thanks to our many awesome partners in food, farming, and ecology who have been guest speakers or led working field trips for our teens! It has been a fantastic experience.
Written by Carolyn Cosgrove-Payne, Teen Programs Coordinator
USDA Awards Grant to Support Green Jobs for St. Louis Teens
Gateway Greening, Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis Public Schools among organizations working together to support teens pursuing degrees and careers in food, agriculture, and natural resources
ST LOUIS, Missouri, April 4, 2017 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a $135,000 two-year grant to local organizations that employ teens in urban farms, parks, trails, gardens, and other green space. As part of its SPECA program (Secondary Education, Two-Year Postsecondary Education, and Agriculture) in the K-12 Classroom, the agency is supporting a collaborative project of Gateway Greening, Missouri Botanical Garden, Saint Louis Public Schools, and other community organizations, aimed at connecting urban teens with outdoor summer jobs and school-year internships that also provide opportunities for academic enrichment, career development, and civic leadership.
Specifically, funding will support youth workforce development through the efforts of the St. Louis Green Teen Alliance, a collaborative of 8 organizations who collectively recruit, employ, train, and support teens via summer jobs and school-year internships focused on productive, healthy lands and waters, ranging from community gardens in food desert neighborhoods to city parks, trails, and reserves. In addition to building critical skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration, the effort is designed to cultivate a sense of civic pride and ownership among participants, building a future workforce with training in urban issues and solutions.
“This is far more than a summer jobs program,” says Dawna Wharton, Career and Technical Education Specialist for Saint Louis Public Schools. “Our students will learn first-hand about urban agriculture, ecology, and environmental stewardship. They’ll interact with career professionals in fields like urban planning, natural resource management, environmental engineering, education, research, and public policy. And they’ll do all of this alongside peers, working in their own neighborhoods and communities.”
The two-year grant will also fund the University of Missouri – St. Louis to lead an evaluation and assessment effort aimed at improving program impacts in the areas of knowledge and attitudinal shifts and broadening of academic and career interests among participants. Indicators of success will also include direct improvements to green space, such as local food production, ecological restoration, storm water management, and wildlife habitat.
Information on the St. Louis Green Teen Alliance, its programs, and partner organizations can be found at http://www.stlycc.org/.
This project was supported by the SPECA Program of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA, Grant#12122428
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About Gateway Greening
Gateway Greeningis a nonprofit organization that educates and empowers people to strengthen their communities through gardening and urban agriculture. Gateway Greening has been working to provide creative, grassroots solutions to urban problems since 1984. Programs include supporting more than 220 community and youth-focused gardens across the St. Louis area through educational opportunities, garden supplies and technical assistance, and the Gateway Greening Urban Farm, a 2.5-acre farm in downtown St. Louis that provides therapeutic horticulture and jobs training.
About Missouri Botanical Garden
The Missouri Botanical Garden’s mission is “to discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment in order to preserve and enrich life.” Today, 158 years after opening, the Missouri Botanical Garden is a National Historic Landmark and a center for science, conservation, education and horticultural display.
About Saint Louis Public Schools
Saint Louis Public Schoolsis the district of choice for families in the St. Louis region that provides a worldclass education and is nationally recognized as a leader in student achievement and teacher quality. The SLPS mission is to provide a quality education for all students and enable them to realize their full intellectual potential. SLPS also believes that competent, caring, properly supported teachers are essential to student learning.
Dig It STL Interns ask: “Why are you tilling the Farm beds?”
Since October, Dig It interns Adam and Anna have been hard at work on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm. From researching and creating a crop rotation plan for the coming year, to getting outside and performing hands-on tasks, they’ve been an incredible help this spring.
As Adam and Anna have learned about soil structure and different soil management practices during their internship, they asked Teen Program Coordinator Carolyn Cosgrove-Payne: “why do we till the vegetable beds on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm?” As an urban agriculture organization, Gateway Greening teaches about no-till practices in our curriculum and discuss the benefits of no-till for microbial activity, soil fertility, and carbon sequestration.
However, we have never tried using no-till soil management practices on our own urban farm. When challenged with the question, the staff thought about it and realized the main reason we haven’t tried no-till is… inertia. Gateway Greening has never directly used no-till and things seemed to be working fine, so it never entered our minds.
As part of the Dig It school-year program, interns are required to complete a culminating project that demonstrates some of the knowledge they gained during their time with Gateway Greening this spring. We are excited to announce that Adam and Anna have chosen to put forth a No-Till Proposal for the Gateway Greening Urban Farm as their culminating project.
Gateway Greening No-Till Proposal by Anna Dotson (McKinley High School) and Adam Mancuso (Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience)
Traditional farming practices utilize tilling when preparing to plant new seeds in the ground. This is done in several ways, from large machinery to handheld tools, bu the goal is the same: to loosen and aerate the soil in order to make it easier to plant and introduce nutrients. However, this process also interrupts the natural soil building process that is occurring during the growing season. This is why some farmers choose to instead use no-till practices on their farms, to maintain and boost this process. While till farming builds up the soil (using compost, fertilizers, etc), tears it down, and builds it up again, no-till farmers instead continuously build up the soil throughout the year. We will be testing out no-till farming on the Gateway Greening Urban Farm this season in three different beds- lettuce, okra, and butternut squash. The process we will use on those beds is as follows:
Use a crimper to crush the stems of the cover crop
Use tarps to cover the no-till beds and smother remaining cover crops (1-2 weeks)
Add 4 inches of mulch during initial seeding of bed
Remove perennial roots from soil where seeds are being planted
Incorporate dead vegetation back into the mulch
Pull mulch away from stems of young growing plants
Add more mulch as plants grow
Spread compost around plants before adding more mulch on top
Water beds minimally using drip irrigation
Educate visitors: “Don’t compact the soil my dudes!”
Before and after the beds are planted, we will be measuring several aspects of soil health through soil testing (pictured in attached pix), and we will compare tilled and no-till beds of the same crops for diseases, pests, and yield throughout the season.
“My name is Kierra Graves, and I am a member of the 2016 Dig It crew. I am a rising senior of MICDS. Before beginning the Dig It program I assumed that I would be planting flowers and digging up dirt around the city. I had been referred to this job by a co-worker’s family member so I didn’t know much about what Dig It did in general. I also had some anxiety about having to work in the heat and being the “new girl” because I came later than most of the crew.
After my first day on the farm I realized this program was much more than planting flowers for a check. I quickly discovered that the crewmembers interacted more like siblings or cousins rather than co-workers. Although I had jobs where people were close I [had] never seen everyone get along so well. Also, I realized that every workshop, field trip, and task was personally helpful to me because everything I was learning could be applied to and improve the quality of my life.
The last full week of the program proved to be the most important week for me. My biggest take away from the Dig It program 2016 is appreciating my ability to make a change and having joy in doing so.
On the last Friday, as I was washing harvest crates, I really began to appreciate the work we all did here. Watching the food being packed and put into the truck made the fact that we did [the] work to feed real people. I gained so much satisfaction knowing what I was doing had a purpose. It never hit me until then that the work I put in, that we put in impacted the lives of so many people. All in all, you never know how much your actions could bless others, whether you see it or not.”
-Kierra, Dig It Crew Member 2016
Through Dig It, high school students develop agricultural and ecosystem knowledge, community leadership skills, public speaking skills, and passion for environmental stewardship.
This Giving Tuesday we’re raising $5,000 to support Dig It STL!
2016 saw such demand for our summer teen employment program, Dig It STL, that we’ve decided to expand it to a year-round program! Now, students can continue to get hands on with diverse urban agriculture and conservation initiatives around the city throughout the school year. Through Dig It, high school students develop agricultural and ecosystem knowledge, community leadership skills, public speaking skills, and passion for environmental stewardship, all while learning valuable soft job skills and earning a paycheck.
Dig It STL’s expansion has been partially funded through a multi-year grant, but we need your help to fill the gap! Please consider helping us reach our goal of $5,000 by giving a gift on November 29th- Giving Tuesday. Make a difference in the life of a St. Louis teen!
“My name is Myra and I have been working at Gateway Greening for a year and I am an alumnus for various things. I’m an Alumni intern, Dig It crew member and leader. I am 19 years old an I’m an undecided sophomore student at the University of Missouri St. Louis. For the last year I have been particularizing on what to study in college and by working with Gateway Greening I have noticed that I enjoy working outdoors and that I enjoy science more than any other specialty. I know that I will decide one day but sometimes I feel like I can’t because I don’t believe in myself as much as I should.
My defining moment was when I was offered the position to be a crew leader for the 2016 Dig It crew. When I was first offered the position I kept pushing it off because I didn’t think I would make a good leader. So after a few weeks I thought to myself if someone I only knew for a few months trusts me to take a higher position as a leader, then why shouldn’t I? So I decided to take the offer because my great, supportive supervisor, Carolyn believed in me more than I believed in myself. To this day I thank her for that push out of the tree and allowing me to fly to learn and develop self-confidence and other skills the position pushed me to have.”
This Giving Tuesday we’re raising $5,000 to support Dig It STL!