Hi! We’re the Outdoor Youth Corps, and this is a glimpse of what we do on an average day. This selfie is from the first field trip we ever took outside of the garden, to help the North Side OYC remove invasive species at Greenwood Cemetery. This was in one of the first weeks of the program, and even though we didn’t know each other very well, we still had a great time! Greenwood Cemetery was established in 1874, and was the first non-denominational African American cemetery in St. Louis. At over 30 acres, the restoration effort has been difficult, and mostly been supported by the efforts of one man, Raphael Morris. He founded the Greenwood Cemetery Preservation Association, which coordinates volunteers (like us!) from across the area to restore and honor this historically significant place
One of our main projects of the summer was to remove wintercreeper and English Ivy from an area in the garden. It was really hot out and hard to pull the invasive species- in this picture Marquis was stuck in some winter creeper while he was trying to kick it out. We ended up getting the whole area pulled and most of it mulched. The garden plans to plant native species there next year.
We spent some days this summer with Kevin who works in General Services. In this picture, he and Sandy were driving around the garden in this golf cart. We have done a lot of things with Kevin like power washing a bus station and using rotary hammers to break down bricks. On that specific day we also measured the grade of some parts of the garden by shooting transit.
On this day we were at Bellefontaine Cemetery building a nice long trail. We had to pay attention to the curve of the land so that when it rains all the water can just flow down and off to the side of the trail we made. Most of the tools we used were hoes, hard rakes, shovels, Mcleods, and Pulaski’s. Our goal was to get as much of the trail done as we could during the 2 days we worked on it.
One of the best days we had this summer was when we went to the Busch Wildlife Conservation Area. We worked with two people on the fisheries crew doing surveys with electrofishing and seining. In this picture, we are identifying some of the fish we caught. We ended up catching 17 different species of fish that day.
