Written by Ely Grimm | October 2025
In April of this year, I was hired as the Stewardship & Facilities Assistant at Nature At The Confluence. My primary focus is to manage the land here, including the vegetable gardens. In this vein, the first big project I was tasked with was leading a new garden program with the South Beloit Boys & Girls Club over the summer. Years ago there had been a garden at the club, but the raised beds hadn’t been tended to in years and were overflowing with deep rooted weeds. Entering this job, I was excited to put energy into learning how to design lesson plans and I felt passionately about putting everything I could into making this program the best it could be.
Youth participants harvesting in mid summer
I spent a lot of time planning and brainstorming and researching, ordering seedlings and tearing out huge weeds from and moving all of the old raised beds from the back of the building to a more accessible place in the front. In my previous job I provided garden education for high school students, so I was excited and even overwhelmed by all the possibilities to teach youth about different regenerative growing practices. Our first program was a planning session, and I was so nervous to implement the lesson plan I had spent many hours worrying over. The group of middle schoolers seemed interested in the idea of doing a garden experiment and making connections to their favorite foods, but when I took them out to look at the garden beds I saw their eyes glaze over. They started to stand off to the side on their phones or move towards a different activity. We made garden collages from seed catalogs and the idea of companion planting didn’t seem to stick very well with any of them (though many of them liked the companion planting corn and bean dip we made). I could only engage one or two kids in wanting to plant seeds.
After our two “garden planning” sessions, I came away feeling disheartened and worried I had failed to instill any excitement or ownership of the garden in the kids. I buckled down on going by to do work on the space, planting, weeding and figuring out how I could come by to water and tend to the beds. I had no idea how I would manage two gardens by myself but I was trying my best. We planted the seedlings with the kids, and even with my best efforts to lay everything out, the plants went in the ground all over the place. I was so worried about the seedlings being planted right and with the proper spacing that I almost didn’t register how joyfully and enthusiastically the kids took to planting and their exclamations of how much they loved it. I laid down straw and cardboard and hoped it would help with the weed pressure.
As the busyness of summer progressed, I had less capacity to work at the club garden and knew I had to let go and allow it to be what it would be. I would fearfully return to the garden after not seeing it in a while, and to my surprise, the plants weren’t all dead. Many were flourishing, even, despite a weed here and there. The staff had been watering with the kids, the straw kept the weeds down, and the plants were in a spot with a good amount of sun and knew what to do. I took all the tomatoes I bought at the store to make salsa home untouched, surprised by the abundance of almost everything I needed to make salsa being provided by the beds. It was one of the many times I anxiously brought ingredients to use only to find them already there for us. I pared down my five part lesson plan structures to just two parts – tend to the garden and make food from the harvest. Every week, the kids would try something new, notice how something grew, and excitedly put veggies and herbs into a bag to take home to their families.
Fall harvest
I began to see familiar faces coming back week after week, asking about what we were making and excited to get back in their garden. Countless kids made connections to other gardens they had helped in or family recipes they were familiar with, and many talked about their favorite recipes from past weeks (pickles were a hit). Some days it seemed like energy was high and many kids would rather be playing, but there would always be a couple people that wanted to take food home at the end. Kids started telling me about the produce they were recognizing and harvesting on their own, too.
To wrap the season up this month, I ran by the garden a few days before to see what was growing, and decided we could clean out the garden of all the variety of greens, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers to make a salad, along with cleaning out the herb bed for a basic salad dressing and tea. It was so much less stressful to put together lessons based on what I saw thriving. We had a huge group for this last program, and every kid seemed so excited just to be outside. They loved harvesting and trying new things (even kale!) and everyone was actually excited about making salad. All of the kids helped make the food, and almost every kid enthusiastically tried and finished both the tea and salad. Many had never had tea or salad before, and multiple kids said they never eat salad but would this time. Some tied together herbs to take home, took home recipes and more vegetables, and one boy took home six servings of salad for everyone in his family, saying he could eat it every day.
Though high energy, this last lesson felt like a high note and everything I would hope for from a program like this. Upon reflection, certainly not every program had gone this way. I never knew what to expect going in, and the best laid lesson plans didn’t help. The kids could be low energy, high energy, enthusiastic or not, many or few, and a variety of ages. Sometimes a group would love a routine gardening activity, like watering, planting, and harvesting – other times a group wasn’t interested. But at the end of the day, I learned to let go and let the land lead the teaching in accordance with what the kids wanted that day. The most joyful moments of connection I witnessed were when I put myself as an assistant to what the land provided, a listener to what a child needed, and put all my expectations and pre-conceptions to the side.
This collaborative program was made possible by the Stateline Community Foundation’s Community Impact Grant.
Youth preparing salad and herbal tea
