Students embrace Upper St. Clair gardening project at Gilfillan Farm

A gardening project at Upper St. Clair’s Gilfillan Farm has thumbs turning green in Lynn Kistler’s environmental science class.
“The kids have been super-enthusiastic,” she reported. “We actually started some plants inside, right after spring break. They’ll come into class and run to the window to check their plants right away, and they’re like their little babies.”

Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Zach Ioli works on putting gardening soil in place.
The seedlings that sprouted at Upper St. Clair High School are being transferred to raised beds on the Gilfillan property that not only beautifies the rural oasis along Route 19 but benefits families in need: Vegetables grown in the garden are donated to the South Hills Interfaith Movement’s food pantries in Bethel Park, Baldwin Borough and Whitehall.
The cooperative arrangement began last spring with an invitation for students to tend to the five raised beds near the farm’s Orr Road entrance. The students built five more this year and plan to fill them all, thanks to donations from several area businesses, community groups and the TangerKIDS grant program.
“We’re going to have 480 square feet of raised-bed space,” Kistler, the high school’s science department curriculum leader said. “If we’re doing the square-foot garden method, that’s 480 different mini-plots. So if you think about it that way, there’s a lot of planting that is going to need to go on.”
The technique of dividing the growing area into 12-by-12-inch sections, popularized by the late author Mel Bartholomew, allows for a variety of plantings within relatively small spaces.
“It fits in well with the topics I teach in environmental science,” Kistler explained, “such as intercropping and pest management techniques that are organic, kind of confusing the bugs so they don’t know where to go instead of planting everything in one space.”

Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Andrew Wharton hauls a vat of finish to help protect a newly built raised bed.
Along with providing access to the raised beds, the Historical Society of Upper St. Clair, which owns Gilfillan Farm, arranged to have a substantial amount of space plowed along the Route 19 side of the property.
“We’re going to be growing corn in kind of a historical method we learned about called ‘three sisters,'” Kistler said, describing a method by which the corn is planted in a roughly two-by-two-foot plot, with beans growing on the perimeter.
“The beans use the cornstalks as their trellis,” she explained. “Then you put squash around the outside, and that acts almost like a ground cover that helps hold the moisture in there.”
Sunflowers also will be grown, primarily as an aesthetic touch to delight passing motorists and users of the trail that rings the farm.

Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Lacey Kohler gets ready to help as Liv McClelland maneuvers a wheelbarrow into position.
The 15 students taking advanced placement environmental science are taking the lead on the project. Students in the high schools life skills program helped clear the beds prior to planting, and the garden also can be used for other educational purposes.
Members of Westminster Presbyterian Church, located across the street from the farm, tended to the garden during summer break last year and plan to do the same once school has concluded.
“I’m hoping it’s not just a spring project for the school,” Kistler said. “We still should be harvesting, certainly, into September, and it would be great if we could get a couple of kids to go over to the food pantry on distribution day. I think they’d be more into it the entire year if they actually see where the produce is going.”