 Hi, my name is Alan Griganis. I am the K-8 Teaching Farm Manager with Jones Valley Teaching Farm. My name is Sarah Bell. I'm the Downtown Assistant Farm Manager. We are currently at the Teaching Farm at Avondale Elementary School. This is one of seven locations. We are in five K-8 schools, as well as Woodlawn High School, and we have a downtown production farm. We utilize these Teaching Farm spaces to teach standard space lessons to pre-K through graduating seniors. At each of our sites, we have a full-time instructor that works within the schools to teach the lessons. On our K-8 sites, we have myself, along with graduate apprentices, managing the sites, making sure the produce is grown and the site is beautiful and maintained. And then at our Woodlawn High School location, we have an instructor, a farm manager, an assistant farm manager, and a small team of about a half a dozen high school apprentices. And then downtown, we have Sarah Bell and Jessica. To be outside and do hard work every day, especially at Jones Valley, we get to share that knowledge with people who are interested and share those passions with like-minded folks. It is an intersecting point of a lot of different passions and interests of mine. It overlaps into activism, physical activity, the environment, technical labor skills, organization and planning, working with other people. It's a very satisfying, deeply satisfying occupation for me. A farm mainly because it's just been a natural path for me. My background is mostly environmental activism and environmental education. And being at a Teaching Farm is a natural fit for that because we're outside, we're interacting with the environment, particularly in an urban setting, which I think is very important, especially for children to realize that nature is everywhere, the environment is everywhere is something that no matter where you are, whether you're inner city or out in the country, we all rely on the same environment. And personally also as a job choice, I really enjoy being outdoors. I really dislike going to a gym and working out. And manual labor is a great way to stay outside and get exercise and stay healthy. And I love just being outside and hearing all the sounds. Even here I can hear the highway in the background, but I can also hear about three or four different bird songs right now. Pretty soon we'll be hearing and seeing the buzzing of bees and different pollinators and butterflies. So just being a part of that season will change from day to day. Personally, I think it's good for the soul and I love to be able to share that with our youth. All right, we're right in the midst of spring planting, so some of our beds are planted and others are in transition, but we'll take a walk through. Over here we have some leeks in the middle. On the outer edge is actually volunteer garlic from last year, so we're actually going to pull that out and we're going to sow some mustard greens. We have green onions and garlic over here. And these beds are waiting to be sown, I believe, with cucumbers. And then over here we have more leeks. And again, we're going to sow the perimeter. I can't exactly remember what is on our crop plan, but it is coming soon. To the right we have color greens. And in the middle we're going to have arugula right in the middle of the H. And then also here you see these are sensory mounds, so all of our teaching farm sites have these for children to explore the five senses. And we have here is sound and we have Nigella planted, so when they form their seed pods and dry out they rattle. And over here is touch, so we have sensitive plant that will grow in the summer or touch me not when you touch it, the leaves close up. It's an absolute favorite of the children as well as the lamb's ear, of course, which is soft and fuzzy. Over here to our left we just prepped this bed. We applied potash and feathermilk and we're about to transplant tomatoes. And over here we just last week transplanted kale. And you see in the middle again we have leeks. And our transplants we actually grow at Woodlawn High School. We have a greenhouse there where we sow all of our little seedlings for transplant, not only to our school sites but also transplants that we give away to other community gardens all throughout Birmingham to help their project as well. And over here we're getting ready to transplant these hot peppers and shishito peppers. And this is our sensory mound for sites, so we have really colorful flowers. Again more kale over here. And then these beds covered in the black plastic, we have those to solarize the beds to increase the soil temperature so we can sow carrots here momentarily. And this is our taste mound, our lassits. So we have sorrel, chives and mint primarily planted here. We just recently threw in some marigolds that were donated to us. So we threw those in. And then to my left here we're getting ready to transplant these sweet peppers. And then our kale has started to bolt so shortly we'll be turning this bed over. And I believe planting squash if I remember correctly. Over here through the weeds we have, when the students are here we will plant the perimeter of this with sunflowers, both single branching tall sunflowers as well as short branching sunflowers. We'll then interplant that with morning glory, which of course is a vine that will grow up the sunflowers and will run string across the sunflowers to form a roof with the morning glory. So this will turn into a sunflower house, a nice little getaway. Especially for our pre-k and kindergarteners, they really like smaller spaces and it's just a magical little area for them to be in. And we have a few fruit trees. We have more mint and sorrel. Sorrel is one of the children's favorites because it's sour. And they'll come over here throughout the day to eat munch on those leaves. And here we just have a mound of just decorative flowers, cutting flowers from Ami and we have some Najela in here as well. And on top that is a purple martin house. Purple martins are a threatened species of migratory birds. They live most of their months in South America and then in the winter and spring they make their way this way to breed and they will actually return to the same home year after year. And so this is our attempt to attract them. We haven't attracted them yet. This was from a grant from Alabama Audubon. And we are still waiting for them to arrive. We have seen them in the area so we know they live here. We're just hoping their populations grow to the point of this becoming a welcoming home for them. All of our sites have compost. Of course, not only is it healthy for our plants but it's a great teaching tool for the students to learn about decomposition and how soil is made. Let's forget what's going in here. Okra. Yes, we just prepared this one so we're going to transplant okra today. Two varieties, Carmen's Blender and Clemson. Two varieties. We have a little herb mound. This is our kitchen mound. So thyme, oregano, rosemary. We even have some tarragon that will come back soon. Lemon balm. Lavender. Again, sorrel. Can't have enough sorrel. Never can. More collard greens. And we're also going to transplant some zinnias in here for cut flowers and also just for the color. We'll do that today. This is our medicinal mound. So the plants in this bed all have a medicinal characteristic from mullin to mugwort, yarrow, even rose hips and fever-few. And we'll have some echinacea that will come back here shortly. And this is our strawberry bed. We have lots of blooms already. So we should have an early crop of strawberries assuming we don't have another tree. And above us muscadines, which is another student favorite. It welcomes them back to school every year in August. They're always ready to be picked when school resumes. And when students come to help out on the farms, we always like to thank them. And muscadines are a great way to thank them. And sometimes we don't have any projects for them to do. So they'll do some projects around the school grounds, such as picking up trash. And we'll provide them with the muscadines as a little treat. And all of our K-8 sites, including Woodlawn High School, has a water feature, a pond. And so in this case, we have brim and bass in here. Some of our other sites will have poi, catfish, and so forth. So at a few of our teaching farms, we have worm bins. Similar to the compost, it's a great way to teach about decomposition. And so in here we have red wigglers. And we can see if we can get. There they are. Very healthy. They mostly get a good diet of my leftover apple cores from lunch. And the kids love it because worms are just so curious and yet so gross at the same time. And so elementary school students just love to peek in here and hold worms whenever they can, whenever they visit. And we have raccoons, so we keep it covered for the way to go. And here are cisterns. All of our sites will have these rain catchment cisterns. And I mentioned we use these primarily for hand watering. But also as an educational tool, of course, about not only the water cycle, but also engineering because there are certain things you have to do to angle the catchment systems and to get the water into the cistern. And this cistern actually fills from the bottom up. So nice little engineering lessons go into that. This is one of our teaching spaces. A little more of a traditional setting where they're kind of facing the whiteboard. Often we will start here on a lesson to sort of lay out the framework of what we're learning. And then from, you know, after about 10 or 15 minutes here, we'll then move into the farm space to do more of a hands-on experience. Here are our wash stations. Which is also a favorite spot of students because they like to get wet. But we utilize a three-sink system here, have a staging area, and we basically work our way towards the covered area here where the produce is weighed and bagged and then recorded before being distributed wherever that may be. So it being springtime, we're doing a lot of transplanting in the beds. Today we have tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, and some okra, and we also have some flowers. The first step in transplanting is to give them a drench in fish fertilizer and CCOM, which gives them a boost of nitrogen and helps with transplant shock once we put them in the soil. This is a specialty pepper called mellow star. It's a type of shishito pepper, which is a frying pepper. And we're going to be putting them in this bed here. We're going to be doing two rows and then a foot 12 inches spacing. So first step after our drench, we have a ruler here, which we use at all of our sites. It's just good to keep a straight line and make sure that we're getting even spacing between all of the plants. So first step we'll place them at foot intervals. And usually there's one person plopping them out and another person will come behind, use the trowel, and transplant them into the ground. Some plants are particularly salonums like peppers and tomatoes. They have what are called advantageous roots. So the deeper you plant, the more roots will form out of those stems. And the measuring stick of course is always good for, as a learning experience for the children as well. We can practice their math skills. You see Alan is planting them pretty deep so that the stem is deep into the soil. You don't want too much, you know, for the wind in case it can blow around and snap the stem. It also helps with root development and just making sure you get all of the soil medium that it's been growing in far beneath the surface of the soil in the bed. Alright, so we're going to, on this side of the bed we've got some hot peppers to plant. We have habaneros and jalapenos. Being in elementary school, this is all we're going to grow. Younger children just don't quite handle the heat. Quite like maybe our high school or middle school students would, so we're just going to do a few of these, let's split some of these up. They had really good germination. So we get our seeds primarily from Johnny's online, but we also do Southern Seed Exchange and Baker Creek Farms. Those have just been really reliable seed providers. And then like I said before, we sow all these in our greenhouse at the high school. So often we will have an after school program called Farm Club as a pretty small group of students that come out weekly to do, I guess, what you would imagine Farm Club would be. They prepare the soil, they prep, they sow, they transplant, they harvest, they wash. So they do all these processes that we are doing today but in a more structured learning environment. And another after school program we have is Market Club where the students, similar to Farm Club, a small group after school, however, rather than doing a lot of the growing and harvesting, they actually will take the produce harvested by Farm Club and will set up a little table in front of the school during pickup at the end of school when the parents come to pick up their kids and they will sell the produce to families. And a lot of folks here in Avondale will actually come from the community neighboring, some of our neighbors will come and they will purchase produce from the students. And, you know, we sell the produce and in the markets, you know, most things are only a dollar or two dollars because the primary goal is to teach them to, you know, interact with people on a customer service level to doing their quick math, producing change but also be able to describe the food that they are selling, what it tastes like, how it can be prepared and things like that. So really salesmanship, customer service, marketing because they have to set up the table in an attractive manner. So very, very, very fun club to watch. So here we have, we use this drip line here. We can not only turn off individual lines as they are not needed but each bed also has, oh there it is, we also have the ability to turn each bed off or on which is really great in the summer when we have certain vegetables that just need a lot of water and others like peppers and tomatoes that don't need the water. We can control each individual line bed and larger bed throughout. We also have, on the back of the shed, we have a rain cistern and we'll primarily use that with students to do hand watering so we'll fill up some five gallon buckets and they'll dip watering cans and they'll help water throughout the farm, farm space with that. For example, our crop plan for this spring planting and even summer we were working on that as we were planting for fall and winter. So we stay well ahead of the curve and that has proved especially beneficial during the pandemic because gardening has become so popular that finding seeds has become difficult. So with our advanced planting we were able to stay ahead of that and for the most part get the seeds that we needed for our planting processes. That would be my advice. Sarah Bell is a little more experienced than I am. Well, I would consider myself a beginning farmer as well. Planning is a really big component of farming. You're always looking a season ahead. I would suggest doing the work of becoming a farm crew member of a farm you really admire or look up to if you're able to do that. You can get a lot of experience from other farmers and even just working a couple seasons or a year. I think there's a lot of farmers that want to help other farmers. I would add the extension is a great resource. I tell all of our graduate apprentices as they work through our program and leave our program if they want to start their own farms that the extension service is probably one of the better resources that we have available. We're already paying for it through taxes and so might as well take advantage of the services that have provided the professional knowledge of horticulturists and what not. They've seen it all basically. They visit so many different farms. They stay on top of all the different diseases and issues we face, especially in the South. So definitely reach out to get to know your extension agent. Organization-wide we do utilize the Farming Basics app. I love it because it's all the color photos of pests and diseases specific to certain crops. It's very helpful. It's also very helpful for students to be able to show different things to them because we can't always see the cut worms and what not. They're not always on the plants for us to show but to be able to show them an image and the damage they cause is really beneficial. I'm not familiar with anything else we might use. We use the soil testing lab a lot. We send all of our soil samples to Auburn. That is really helpful, especially for a new farmer if you're on land that has never been farmed or is new to you to get a soil test and be able to use that service. That can help you a lot with just which amendments to put into your soil and how to treat your soil to help its productivity over the years. We've attended a lot of the lunch and learns at the Botanical Gardens and I know extension agents have been a lot of the speakers for those programs and that's been really beneficial, especially for our younger apprentices. To market our work, we utilize a lot of social media, Instagram primarily. We have a Twitter account, a Facebook account. Our website is always meticulously updated. There's a blog on there as well and with links to our YouTube channel which has a lot of educational content, particularly throughout the pandemic that we produced to be able to reach students and the larger community as well. That's really a great way to get a taste of what we do in schools because, well, of course, we grow food and students learn how to grow food. We actually teach more math and science and things like that by growing food. For example, when we put the plants in the ground we talk about plant needs anywhere from soil, water, air, sunshine and the parts of the plant and then we go deeper and talk about photosynthesis and the water cycle. We really get in depth. We just use growing food as a hands-on tool to teach standards-based lessons that they're already learning but now they go beyond the book by coming out to the teaching farms.