 Welcome to our last in a series of 10 Wednesday weekly webinars. And my name is Julie Garden Robinson, and I'll just give you a real brief introduction, and then I'll tell you a little bit more about Todd Weinman, who is our speaker today. First, we're really happy to see all of you here. We've had really good participation in these webinars, and we hope to continue to do these in the future. So we're always looking for your input on topics that you're interested in. I think you've all figured out the system. We have you in listening mode. You can go ahead and type your questions in the chat pod anytime that Todd is talking, but we're going to keep it on the topic of youth gardening today. Because gardening is a huge topic, and we just are going to focus in on youth gardening and some best practices. We'll have time at the end of the webinar for questions and answers. And final plea. Please fill out the short survey that will be sent to you at the end of the webinar. That will let us know if you learned something, and to also give us some feedback for future webinars. And again, we hope to continue to offer these. This was all part of a field to fork grant from the North Dakota Department of Agriculture. And I certainly invite you to check out all of the resources that we have online. And there is a handout about gardening with youth with some specific instructions and recommendations, I should say, about gardening with youth. So with that, I'm going to give you just a quick introduction of Todd. I've known Todd for many years. He is an extension agent in Cass County, and his specialty is horticulture. And the horticulture program in Cass County includes providing the public with current research-based information on gardening, lawn care, plants and flowers, trees and shrubs, and many other horticultural topics. And Todd's programs include helping with the master gardener program, the junior master gardener program, and also with urban gardening. Well, thank you Todd for being with us, and I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you, Julie. We'll get started here. One thing that when you work with youth or with kids, you want them to have success. And so, for example, you want to have a little fun with them too. So what I always try to do, like say, someone comes up to me and says, I'm working with 12 second graders. What can I do to get them engaged to enjoy the project and get going? Here's some instant real fire winners right here. One thing to remember is you can do seeds, but seeds are small. And so if you do just like little carrot seeds, you'll find that when they start growing in the row that the kids were working on, there'll be 400 carrots coming up in a little 3 by 3 inch area, and the rest of the row will be barren. So what I would suggest is successful, fun types of plants to grow. First being potatoes, blue or purple. One thing to remember with blue or purple potatoes, they are blue or purple, and they're very fun. They're nice. The problem is that they're very aggressive plants. So a few plants, one blue or purple potato, it's a good chance that everything within 3 feet circumference around it will be destroyed because it will just continually grow. And you can use these on a trellis, and that's a nice way to do it, but they will take over an area. Another thing that has done very well with kids is sunflowers. If you want to have a fantastic project with kids, get some giant Russian mammoth sunflowers. I grew these in my backyard one year, and they were 21 feet tall. People would stop on the sidewalk, look in my backyard and go, what are these people looking at? Oh, the sunflowers, because you could see them. They were just gigantic. Kids love it. What I would suggest is get enough sunflowers to build a square, and you tell the kids, kids are youth. I use interchangeably. We're going to build a fort here, and what we're going to do is we're going to make it, for example, 8 feet by 8 feet, and they have them put the sunflowers and say, the plant that comes from this little seed will be taller than you. They won't believe you. They'll help you plant it. You have a square walled fort with just a square row of sunflowers. You make basically the walls of the sunflower plants as you plant them, and the kids will love it. Tomatoes, a lot of kids would rather never eat a tomato. But if you grow or have them grow yellow-pair tomatoes or basically any kind of cherry tomato, they'll be success. Why do I say yellow-pair? The flavor to me is kind of bland. However, they do look like a little tiny yellow-pair, and it'll be a novelty for the kids. They'll love it. They'll actually eat it. It'll go really good. Beans, if you're going to have kids that have a large seed, you want to have them plant it, do yellow or purple. They may not have ever seen a yellow or purple bean. It'll be a huge success. They'll eat them. They'll say, wow. And the purple beans will turn green when you cook them. Radish, I would do round or icicle. Radish are nice because they grow so fast. You can have radish within 28 days if all things go well. It's fantastic. So I would do round and icicle, and they might not like the flavor, but they sure will like to grow them. And you're wondering, well, where can we possibly get these different types of colored vegetables and flowers that are regular, that are on the beaten path, you know, whoever heard of purple carrots or purple lists or what have you. One place to start looking at, and if you want to look up the Home Garden variety trials by Dr. Tom Kelv, he has a number of different types of vegetables that do well here. He has a little variety trials across the state for different people to participate in. Here's how you can get started on that. So if you're interested in that, great. The other thing is this catalog, the North Dakota Home Garden variety trials, is fantastic. It has recommended variety trials or, excuse me, cultivars for our state that have done well here, and it's a lot of fun, different types of different colored fruits and vegetables that you ordinarily wouldn't like, try, and the kids would really like it. Sometimes people want to do projects with kids. Tom Kelv, Dean Ockrey, and myself are part of the North Dakota Junior Master Gardner Program. Each year we get thousands of dollars, around 30,000 in most years, to distribute across the state. Unfortunately, we have, well, it depends on how you look at it. We are not able to provide money or funding to all the projects that come to us. There are some fantastic projects that we just didn't have the money for. They were beaten up by projects that were slightly better or had a little different twist on it. And so it's very difficult sometimes to send out, sorry you did not get this funding for this year, but please do apply again next year type of thing. We do a lot of projects with these kids. Thousands of kids are benefiting from this across the state of North Dakota. It doesn't go into other states. And the projects are for different types of beautifications, growing food for the hungry, many of the long-term care facilities, you name it. The different youth involved with clubs, 4-H, FFA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, schools, libraries, churches, it just goes on and on. So it's a great way to potentially get some funding and start your project that way. Here's a little bit more on that. It goes through the different why would we want to garden with kids or why do we need to garden with kids. Many of our children actually do not get enough vegetables to be healthy. And a lot of them don't get enough physical exercise to be healthy either. By gardening, even if it's a small little one or two-row garden that they have going, they're going to grow vegetables. And if they're growing them, they have ownership and they're more than likely going to eat the vegetables that they grow. And it's some physical activity. They're outside and they're learning about how plants grow. It's all win, win, win. I have some different groups that I work with. I don't have them all on here, but here's just a few highlights. I work with Charism and the coordinator, the community outreach coordinator is Andrea Jean. And we do a lot of work out there together. I don't know who has more fun. The kids are me. And I'll just go through a few things with some of these different projects. Sometimes the kids will say, hey, I think this is ready to pick. And I have to kind of well know, let's leave it on for another few days or another week or another month. Because they don't know. They may have never had a garden before. And they just don't know when to actually harvest the vegetables. So it's good to be out there. You don't have to be out there all the time, but it's good to be out there and answer the questions when they have them. You have to start sometime. The garden's been planted. And we're doing a harvest here where we're going to go through and pick some different things. One aspect of when you're working with kids is sometimes they're smarter than you realize. And life cycles are really big with kids. That's kind of the buzzwords or the words that all the schools are using. What is a life cycle of this or that? And so I incorporate that. And I'll talk to the kids about photosynthesis, fertilizing, weeds, types of watering mechanisms. Why plants are growing this? Why do they need micronutrients? How much do they need for macronutrients? Just a number of different things that they can hopefully use when they're in their science classes at school. Some of the kids I've worked with in different groups and situations and environments, they might never have seen some of the vegetables are growing. Or else they've seen them, but they're already processed in a jar on their pickles. And so I remember this one little kid goes, wow, these cucumbers can be pokey. And some cucumbers do have these little tiny old pokeys. They're not really a thorn, but they're on there. And it's a fun learning experience, especially if they've never encountered it before and only had to process food. Sometimes you need to make a little game out of it for looking for an eggplant that's ready to harvest. Who can find the first purple eggplant fruit that's ready to harvest? And so we get involved that way. It's fun to do it in a fun way, or I guess that is kind of strange to say, but it's more rewarding to make the project fun for the kids. They'll be more involved, a lot more activity if they go, yeah, I found it in the next time you're out there. It's like, no, I'm going to find it this time before my friend does type of thing. So make a little game out of it. It helps with the learning too. This picture was taken after our harvest. And you can see we have a number of different things that the kids actually grew and took care of. I didn't notice one of the kids is giving me the rabbit ears behind the picture. So we have a lot of fun, and it's an experience. When you work with kids, you always want to try to make it at their level, but you don't want to dumb it down to a point where it just isn't of value to them. I like to keep it at a level where they'll understand, but they'll also learn. And they'll say, well, what does photosynthesis mean? And then we'll go through the cycle with sunlight and water as a waste product and such. And I'll ask them questions about it. And so making it fun is just the way to go with this type of thing whenever you work with kids. The other thing too is when you work with kids, all my master gardeners that work with kids, I have them run through child protective services. We do it with the 4-H program here. It's just what we do. And if adults aren't willing to do that, they don't get to be involved with it. That's just how it is. SENCA, that was a completely different environment. The kids are a lot smaller. Whenever I do this, if I can get the directors involved, and sometimes you can, there's a lot more ownership with the project, and you can really get going on it. Here we had some money. We were building some raised beds. There's two different sites, and here's one of the sites. I let them do a lot of the work. I pretend I'm working. I have a shovel there. I just move it from one side of the building to the next. Really, we all worked together, and it was extremely windy that day. And we got these little beds made. They had enough funding for that, and we put some different soil in there and such. And it was all win, win, win. Getting the, especially the directors and the people involved with the project involved, you can hardly go wrong. I did some basic types of training with them. Not every situation that we encounter with working with these kids is different. And so if you remember the last garden we had a carousel, that was in the ground. It wasn't a raised bed. This was a raised bed, and they wanted to have a barrier, and so we used the newspaper barrier in there and went with that route. We didn't use any type of weed killer. The plants will need some fertilizer. Sometimes we have soilless media, and sometimes we don't. Slow release fertilizer is a win, win, win. You apply it, and you mix it in when you're working in your soil, and you're peat moss and compost, and sometimes even when you have soil or compost in there, I'll work in the slow release fertilizer, follow the directions, and then you're done for the year. You don't have to worry, like, oh, make sure I better call them, and next week they need to fertilize the cucumbers. No, you're done. It's in there. It's a product that just releases slowly throughout the year, and it's a lot of fun to do that. There's a number of different soil amendments. The nice thing, you know, in this situation, if you wanted to, we could have basically made three different soil, soils for our boxes. We didn't, but you could, and just compare them. And so what I found is that when you start adding different things, after a while, you find your own basic recipe or mixture for the boxes, and that works well for you, and you go with that. Now, we have a very heavy clay soil here in the valley, and so I tell people not to add any sand or gravel. Many times when you add sand or gravel to our environment here, what you now make is an adobe brick, and that's very difficult to work with and hard to fix. So, but if you should know your soil and your environments before you start, and if you don't ask people or extension agents or what have you, say, hey, what do we have here? And they'll know. Here they are completed. If you look there, they're almost the top, but they're about an inch or two below the lip of the wood there. The reason is that when you water, if you put it right to the top, the seeds and everything goes right over the side and you have to replant. This way the water stays in it, so you don't flood the garden so that it runs over the sides. And that's very important. If you look too, you can make these out of a number of different products. Do not use railroad ties or anything treated with creosote or arsenic or different types of things. I avoid treated wood. Pressure treated wood I use, but it's pressure treated, not chemically treated. And here I just have pine that isn't treated. We have the kids paint it white, and then they paint flowers, designs, and hello grandma and what have you on the sides of these. And they get ownership that way with it also. I use pine. It seems to last about four or five years. Then I start over. It's very inexpensive. It's cheap. And if you want, if you have more money, you can use brick or block, or if you have more money else, so you can use cedar. But here we didn't have as much money for that and there's so much temporary, so we use pine. As you can see, the wind is still blowing and it's actually blowing our hair right off our head. But here we are, we have finished the project and the happy little kids can then plant it in. Here is at the other site. The other site was, oh, still preschool kids, just a different location in the town. And we also did a hunger free garden here and produce was donated. And it's all win, win, win. One thing is get kids involved and we had, for example, the vegetables. I talked with some of those and then they also wanted to plant different things out here and that's fine. But remember, whenever you're working with kids, if you're, for example, doing plants, like a tomato plant and you have room for six and they're little kids like this, not a bad idea to have 12. The reason is that there's a good chance half of them will be destroyed before they even make it into the soil. And so if you have a backup plan like that, it's not a bad idea. Or if later in the week someone leans on it or falls on the plant and crushes it, you can just take another one and slide it in and it's all good. And also, try to get bigger seeds. For example, like beans or peas are nice to grow. If you get into carrots, it's basically a nightmare. They'll dump them all in one spot and now you've got a carrot shrub growing and nothing in the other parts. I talked about the extra plants and seeds right before this happened, right before this picture was taken, the little girl there, really cute, had accidentally ripped the tomato plant in half and we just gave her another one and she planted it right away. We kind of watched so she would destroy that one and then it's all good. I like to get the media involved. I know I work with kids. Here's a project they did out in Castleton with their, I think it was actually their fourth graders out there and basically I taught a lot of new container gardening and everyone got to take home a tomato that was potted up in a container. And if you can get the media involved, that's great. You want to talk to the teachers though first and say, hey, I'd like to get the media involved. Can we take pictures of these kids? Can we go in the newspaper? And sometimes you can. And sometimes they say, no, these two kids cannot have pictures taken. And then you just don't take pictures of those kids. So they might be sitting farther to the left. Or what I do is I have the actual instructor take the picture of the kids because they know who they are and it's not a problem. Sometimes people have gotten written permission. Certain things are public and this is a public area that we did this in so it was fine. Just try to do it the right way if a kid can't have a picture of the newspaper or in social media for a reason. Don't put one in there. Also what I like to do is, for example, that was at Castleton a few years back. I wrote a grant. And I got money and we're going to do not only tomatoes with kids this year but we're also going to talk about honeybees and apple trees. And what I'm basically saying is this, if you work at a place and everything went really good and you want to improve your project, go right ahead. Keep the topic of somewhat of an interest to the kids. If you talked about growing Brussels sprouts, there won't be a kid there interested. Now, tomatoes you can kind of get by with. All kids like bugs or insects. So honeybees are good. And apple trees. We're going to get the kids to plant some apple trees. You have to watch so they don't actually cut their feet off or their neighbors foot with the shovels but we're going to have them do that. They have some ownership and it's a good deal. This picture doesn't really give a justice as an older picture I had. I also have McKinley Youth Gardens in North Fargo. And it depends on the year. We've had up to between 60 to 120 different youth garden plots up there. They're 20 by 20 plots and I have adult volunteers that have been the Child Youth Protective Certified. I space them throughout the gardens. And when kids are out there, they can basically have any questions or ask to these adults and the kids get to know them and they know where their garden plots are. So they say, hey, I've got a question. Is this a plant? I say, yeah, you probably shouldn't have pulled out the pepper plants but so they'll teach them some basic things that they don't know. And it's a lot of fun. Working with kids is very rewarding. It can be really mentally draining but the energy they have it just kind of really brightens your spirit and it's a lot of fun. One thing with these gardens too and everyone has different types of situations but this is a community garden and so I have kids garden here. I don't have somebody who says, yeah, I would just like to have a garden and they're not one of my adult volunteers. I send them over about a block away to, there's other community gardens about a block away. I send them there. So this is for youth. And the gardens here, we don't allow any type of herbicides or pesticides. Everybody has to stay in their own garden. You can look in other people's gardens but you can't be in other people's gardens. They have to have their parent or guardian with them when they're out there and no animals. You can't bring your dogs and cats and so you got to have rules and you need to follow. I've done some other community gardens too. This is a youth garden that we started up in Hankinson in a county to the south of us in Richland County and I was talking to Senator Heitkamp one day and she said, hey Todd, you ever going to do anything in my county? I said, sure. And so we did, this is not my project but I did help with this project and one of Senator Heitkamp's aides is here with me taking a picture and if you look in the background, they've got flowers, there's no weeds, it's just fantastic. So working with kids and getting involvement from others, other entities other than yourself is really rewarding. Here's a little follow up on what I just said and basically she wanted to have an event there. And I did a PowerPoint or impact report so if you're a newer agent in extension and you don't know about PowerPoints, you can look at this. Not PowerPoints, I'm sorry, but impact statements. And I basically did an impact statement on this garden and turned it in for my reporting and it was very nice. So when you do a project, kind of keep in mind the extension response, the impact you had. Here we worked with Hankinson Community and American Legion very well attended group. They were very good to work with. They provided all the soil and it was really good. Then you get some all feedback from people and it's interesting people just start talking to you and they'll say what they liked and what was the success and what they would look forward to in the future. I'll see you whenever you're in the situation that I'm at. You always want to promote yourself. You might think others are going to do it and they might, but they might miss something that you think is worthy. So here's a couple of different publications that I've worked on and they go right hand in hand with this. This is a great one with kids. There's a cute little picture or a cute picture of a little girl on the front and she's missing most of her teeth. It's a fantastic publication. It kind of goes through the basis of gardening. The other thing is garden journal. This is for maybe someone that's a little bit more advanced that would like to have a journal of what they did last year and how they can improve it for the following year. These two you can look up and you can have right out of and use them. Working with youth and their requirements. Now, youth or kids are not all the same. It's amazing. You're just looking with completely different thought processes or range of learning. For example, I'll go through some of these. Sometimes I work with a YMCA and they'll have kids five to 17 years old there and a five-year-old learns differently than a 17-year-old and they have different interests. You can teach them both about ladybugs but with a five-year-old you might have to actually have a little poem or sing or maybe part of the thing they can draw a picture of their ladybug that they saw that day. You get into the 17-year-old you might say, okay, that's some other microscope and I want you to start naming some of the prices, excuse me, some of the parts of the insect and maybe the scientific or genus and species name of them and you make it a little more worthwhile their time. I work with kids that have had Asperger's syndrome. I think I learned more from them than they did for me. They have a different way of thinking than I do, I guess. It was quite a rewarding experience for me and I always hope that they learned something from what I taught them. I know they did but I felt that I actually learned more. Maybe you work with kids with some kind of physical disability. You can work with wheelchair gardens, for example, if you're doing a raised bed like the ones we got earlier, they're too short for a wheelchair and so what you can do is have the kids out there and just kind of assess, okay, they're about this tall. Let's make the beds so they accommodate the wheelchairs. That's all win right there. English is the second language. You might have kids from different countries. I know that I worked with some kids from as far ago that had been refugee camps for six years of their life and so their gardening skills are not what you might expect at, for example, their age and so you'll have to adapt to that and you might have to teach them at a level that's maybe a little less than what you would expect for a kid that age. It doesn't take long for them to catch up but you have to start at a level where they can actually do and then catch up. Also, there's certain different types of religious restrictions sometimes. There's just so many different types of things you can work with. You just have to kind of know the audience you're with and remember that they're kids and so they're going to want to have fun. They're going to want to learn but you also have to be the adult and you have to be in charge and you have to be the one that says, okay, we're doing this and so it's very rewarding. Whenever I do a talk, I always have time for questions but my big disclaimer is questions about this talk only. I really don't want to hear questions about celebrities, what I did when I was a kid. I just won't answer. So if you have questions, I'll give you a little bit of a fire away. If anyone's still there. I think Julie said type of in the chat room but if you don't have questions, that's fine too. I'll give it a little bit here. Todd, I have a question for you. What are the relative merits of using square foot gardening with youth versus random gardening that I've seen? Okay. The square foot gardening is a really nice method. For example, let's say you have a garden in the ground but small. Let's say it's four feet by four feet and you can get maybe two or three rows in there and that's it. With a square foot garden, you actually don't have any walkways and so instead of a walk path, you put another row of vegetables and so instead of three rows, now you've got seven and the square foot gardening type of a method, you can make it into one foot by one foot zones. You can make them one and a half by one and a half foot zones. You can make little zones on that. So if it's four by four feet, you now have 16 zones where in theory you can grow 16 completely different kinds of plants that if they fit in that zone and you can tell, well, how do you know if they fit? Well, you look at the package where you buy your seeds and they'll say, okay, for example, in the row, keep plants nine inches apart. So you could easily have in a square foot, maybe two plants in there without a problem, nine inches apart. Or if it says keep plants one and a half feet apart, well, you might have to deviate and make your, instead of one foot by one foot, now it's one and a half feet by one and a half feet, drop your tomato plant in there and away you go. The advantages of square foot gardening is you save space, water, fertilizer, sunlight and there's less weeding. You don't have to have a walk path. You don't push the soil down. So the soil has more tilt. It's more friable. With these types of gardens, the next year, all you do is add some more soil or just work it up and add some more slow release fertilizer. You can tell by what you need and you probably need to add slow release fertilizer each year. But then you just work it up by hand a little bit or don't work it up. If it's nice and friable, you don't need to. With a garden that's in the ground, many times you have to road until it and you walk on the paths. You make them really nice and hard. So it's actually better for the soil and also there's better drainage and there is a factor of it. It's warmer. And so if everyone, we can't really start gardening until about a week when the soil gets up to 50 degrees, your raised by garden might be ready a week ahead in the fall and it gets cold. You have good drainage. You give a lot of rain, for example. Not a problem. It drains right out. You don't have standing water in there. So I would say that's the advantage. And then also, and you get to be older like me, you don't like to always bend over and grab and pull weeds out. Back gets kind of sore. You just walk out there, pull the weeds, throw it on the lawn and continue on. And if it rains, you don't have to worry about walking in the mud. Just reach out and grab a tomato. You're standing on your lawn or if you have a brick underneath there or what have you. It's not a problem harvesting. Okay, Pat. I have a follow-up question. A follow-up question. Do you have suggestions for planting miniature gardens in pots for kids? Yeah. If you want to do, for example, like a container garden, one thing is that the container or the pots will have to have good drainage. The reason is that our water, for example, here has a little bit of salt in there and if you don't ever let that water run through the bottom, what happens is you build a salt layer up and then one water does hit that. You know, that salt water that your plant is trying to use and that's very hard on it. The other thing is you can put the soil you want in there. A lot of times it's like, I really don't know what to do. Go to your nursery and say, hey, what do you use for your potted tomatoes? They look fantastic. They'll say, well, we use this and that's what I buy. I've always had success when I've done it that way. And you can, for example, you don't have to grow all the Fuji, you want to just grow some herbs. Maybe you want to grow chocolate mint. Maybe you like to, which is a fantastic herb, by the way. I grow it and I take it and I crush it up, add a cup of sugar to it in a pitcher and it tastes like drinking gum. If you like the flavor of gum and you'd like to drink it, that's what I would recommend doing. So you can grow some herbs or a little cherry tomato. One plant that does very well in a container garden and it's not really utilized all that much is eggplant. Eggplant loves container gardens. Biggest thing is make sure it's big enough. You know, you might have five gallon or 10 gallon pail and you can grow a tomato in there. Do you have an ice cream pail? No, not so much. The roots will get so tight in there it won't be able to do well. I saw somebody had a question but I think I missed it. I don't know who it was. If you have a question, if you want to type it in the chat, unless I answered it, obviously then you're going to have to. But I just saw a little red flash and then it disappeared but I didn't get the name. So I don't know who had a question for me. Any other questions for Todd? If there are further questions, I just want to thank you again for attending our webinar today. Please explore the resources. We have a lot of egg mags. We have, you know, various how to grow and how to use different plants. So please check out our resources online. Todd has a bunch of YouTube videos on the CAS extension website. So check those out. And it looks like... I wasn't kidding about the pie thing either. So if you just remind Julie who you were and I'm sure she will follow up on that and deliver a homemade apple or blueberry pie to your home. Well, thank you again everybody. I can't promise a pie but Todd will probably make you something. It probably won't be great. Thank you very much. We'll close today's webinar. Thank you, Todd.