Audio Youth greening the east side of St. Paul (story audio) Photos St. Paul gardening program Making pasta sauce Cleaning up parks View full slideshow (4 images) More from MPR Minneapolis residents build rain gardens (08/01/2003) Your Voice Soapbox: "I used to be a share-holder of this program....The youth were obviously proud of the work they performed, and were well-educated on the food and flowers we got on a weekly basis."

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Youth greening the east side of St. Paul
by Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio
August 4, 2003

The Community Design Center of Minnesota has sponsored the community garden program for some 35 years. Its director says the program helps teach kids civic responsibility. (MPR Photo/Dan Olson)

Surprising as it may seem, gardening is an exotic activity for some -- particularly youngsters. A program in east St. Paul has several dozen young people learning to garden. They're also selling what they raise and getting paid for their efforts. The unusual program is run by the Community Design Center of Minnesota.

St. Paul, Minn. — St. Paul resident Phil Manz has discovered the secret to life, or at least to gardening. Let someone else do it. The cost?

"A little bit of water and a lot less grass to cut," Manz says. "And I get a lot of credit for this from people. People walk by and say, 'Oh, you got a great garden.' Well yeah, but it's not really mine. These other people come in and do it."

	Making pasta sauce

The 'other people' are teenagers from the Community Design Center of Minnesota.

The Center won Manz's permission to use his spacious east St. Paul lot for one of the organization's seven gardens.

Churches and other groups have also donated land.

Dante, one of the teens, says they plant, weed, harvest and sell the produce.

"We've been selling plants and potatoes, anything that grows in our gardens. We've been selling flower bouquets," he says.

Dante is one of 42 Community Design Center workers. They earn as much as $6 an hour for up to 20 hours of work a week. All of the workers come from low income homes.

The center's elementary age students spend six hours a week gardening and learning how to cook.

	Cleaning up parks

Cooking teacher Patsy Metzdorf Noble is helping the children make red sauce, to be poured over butterfly-shaped pasta. She's tying together a theme -- the garden is home to butterflies, and butterfly food is from plants with different colors. A nutritionist tells the young people we need different colors in our diet too, and fruits and vegetables are a good source.

Admirers tout the 35-year-old St. Paul gardening program as a model. Janice Cole wishes there were a counterpart for suburban young people. Cole is an editor for Cooking Pleasures, a Minnetonka-based food magazine. She and others have adopted the east St. Paul program and are organizing a fundraiser for it. Cole says many of the young people come from families who don't have time to tend gardens.

"Their parents are working poor, and they're very busy working and trying simply to get some food on the table," Cole says. "They don't have that luxury of having a garden just for fun and flower, like so many middle-class people do."

This year the Community Design Center of Minnesota started a Conservation Corp. Like the Depression-era program, the workers are from poor families. They're cleaning up east St. Paul parks and making rain gardens -- green spaces that collect and clean neighborhood runoff before it hits the sewer system. Adult supervisor Jessica Ostrov directs teens rehabilitating the long-neglected Hamm's Park on St. Paul's E. 7th St.

	A summer bounty

"It was just paved in here with four-inch thick concrete slabs, and so it's been compacting the soil for many years," says Ostrov. We've had to dig that out because the soil is very compacted. But the kids are doing great, they're not getting discouraged and just chipping away it."

Ruth Murphy, the Community Design Center of Minnesota director, says the program teaches civic responsibility.

"It gives them an opportunity to be recognized in the community as contributing to the community," Murphy says. "It's very exciting to see young people mature, and gain ideas and thoughts about their own careers and opportunities in the future that they'd never thought of before."

Murphy says most of the center's money comes from foundations, businesses and some public dollars. She says up to 20 percent of the non-profit organization's $290,000 budget will disappear because of government funding cuts.

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