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 […]

Hello my name is Alexander Harper I’m a 17 year old that attends Clyde C.Miller Career Academy. My school is a career and technical high school.This means we have career clusters such as Bio-Tech, Nursing, and Business Administration. Students are able to decide what we would like to study when we attend college.   In […]

  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 […]