Gecko Garden 4-H Club
What is it and what did we do?
The Gecko Garden 4-H Club is a school-based club with 29 members in 
Kindergarten through Fifth grade. The club plants and maintains a fenced garden at Manatee School for the Arts and Sciences, a K-5 charter public school in Bradenton, FL. The club is run by parent volunteers and meets once a week to plant and care for four vegtable beds and four butterfly plant beds. The garden was launched last school year with a SOAR grant and is now a 4-H club that plans to use Integrated Pest Management practices.
We wanted to teach the children about their environment and how to protect it. Children love bugs, so we planned to teach them about "good bugs and bad bugs". We taught them about the benefits of crop rotation, disease-resistant plants, and 
non-toxic remedies for unwanted bugs. All club members were enrolled in 4-H's "Entomology and Bees" project and used the "Peek at Pests" curriculum to learn about IPM. We trained the children to become bug scouts and showed them how to identify pests by using magnifying glasses. We taught the children about remedies such as releasing beneficial bugs (ladybugs) and using non-toxic sprays such as insecticidal soap. The club also installed a worm factory in the garden and used worm castings as fertilizer. The children learned how to use organic soil and fertilizers in their Earth Boxes.
We used these approaches to care for our entries in the Florida Nursey Growers 
Landscape Association plant auction in January and the 2007 Manatee County Spring Vegetable Garden contest. We invited experts from the Manatee Cooperative Extension Service to be guest speakers. We worked with the students' science teacher to help the children learn about the life cycles of insects.
What was the outcome?
Twenty-nine students were involved in the club on a weekly basis for the year. 
Each child received and filled out a "Peek at Pests" workbook and used individual magnifying glasses to scout for "good" and "bad bugs".
The students learned and effectively used Integrated Pest Management practices in their vegetable and butterfly garden. Children and families of the Gecko Garden 4-H Club, as well as the rest of the community of Manatee School of Arts and Sciences, benefited by learning about IPM practices and using them in their gardens. The students learned that they could grow 
vegetables without the use of synthetic fertilizers and could control pests through natural methods such as releasing ladybugs. The club also conducted a Community Service project where they planted and cared for flowers in pots, using IPM methods and delivered them to a local senior citizens home. The senior citizens benefited from the IPM gardening and the children's love.
Club leaders evaluated the students' understanding of IPM methods by reviewing 
their "Peek at Pests" workbooks and their end-of-year 4-H record books.
The club won first place in the club division of the Manatee County Spring Vegetable Garden contest!
The people that made this happen include:
- Diana Smith, Extension Agent 4-H Youth Development, Manatee County
- Sylvia Shives, Extension Agent I, Commercial Horticulture, Manatee County
- Ervin Shannon, Agricultural Assistant, Manatee County
- Kathleen Lyons, Gecko Garden 4-H Club Organization Leader