We celebrated Thanksgiving a little early at Clay with a meal we grew in our garden– kale chips and roasted sweet potatoes!   Cooking at school can be a challenge. Last year, we brought a portable fire pit to the school and roasted potatoes and onions in a real fire outside by the garden. This […]

According to LaManda Joy the author of Start A CommunityFood Garden, Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) is an approach that helps communities and groups focus on what they do have instead of what they don’t. The ABCD approach is very powerful because instead of creating anxiety about what a community may be lacking it encourages group to celebrate […]

What’s driving you crazy in your school garden? For this 1st grader, it’s a giant weed that refuses to be pulled out.     There’s a difference between the ongoing tasks of a school garden– mulching, watering, everyday weeding– that cause us stress, and the individual stressors that I like to call ‘tolerations’.   A […]

We celebrated Earth Day at Clay this week by learning about trees. In the words of one of our students, “Trees help keep the earth clean!” We learned how to figure out how old a tree is by counting the rings in a stump, and we made leaf rubbings with different types of tree leaves. […]

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 […]

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) […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]