Middle School Garden at Maplewood Richmond Heights

Maplewood Richmond Heights school district has an established Seed to Table program with gardens at every grade level. The middle school garden aims to demonstrate a household-size urban farm. The backyard has raised beds for vegetable production, an herb spiral, compost facilities, rainwater catchment, and a border of perennial native plants to attract pollinators. The tiny front yard is a miniature fruit food forest, with strawberries, raspberries, bush cherries, an apple, a peach, and a pear tree. This year we added mushrooms to the garden, and to the menu in our Farm to School cafeteria.

Primary classroom tracks of the 8th grade program include seed-saving (thus we grow primarily heirloom vegetables and offer a tiny seed catalog), and "Understanding Food Systems."

The 7th grade program provides hands-on learning with living history and ethnobotany gardens, from three sisters Native American plantings to the work of Missouri native George Washington Carver (we grow sweet potatoes for our cafeteria, and peanuts for snacks). The study of the soil food web and the launch of our vermiculture (worm compost) system to utilize our cafeteria waste round out the 7th grade year.

We also raise plants for our school's aquaponics program, where we grow vegetables indoors in tandem with tilapia and Missouri natives blue gill and black crappie.

Our own blue devil bees pollinate the garden, with 3 Langstroth traditional hives, a top bar hive, and an indoor observation hive in the middle school commons.

Our next expansion is: Chickens! Even with our limited space, we can fit a chicken "tractor" over a single raised bed at a time, providing us with eggs, tillers, pest-eaters, and fertilzer-poopers. MRH students wrote the book on urban chickens (Chickenology: the Art and Science of Keeping Chickens), but until now they have been kept at only at the elementary and preschool gardens.