(wind chimes ringing) (birds chirping) >>Alright, Xavier, you can put them in the bucket, buddy.

Nice.

Alright, let's set those down.

Alright, buddy, let's find more potatoes in here.

There you go.

Nice!

Good job, man.

Alright, let's look and pick some more, man.

In the general public school system, there's just a box and everyone has to fit in that box, and a lot of the students here at the Villa don't necessarily fit in that box.

And so we're trying to do it in a different way, right, and that requires a lot of patience, it requires a lot of empathy.

I think that's the most important piece.

Nice!

>>That kiwi tunnel produces a hairless kiwi.

>>Okay.

>>And basically, it takes us all year to October and we eventually in October will get the sweetest kiwi you'll taste.

>>Oh, wow.

>>If you actually step in the tunnel, it's about 10 degrees cooler inside that tunnel.

It's a shelter space.

It's a shadow space.

It's more of a therapeutic space for them to engage and get a respite from the sounds around, they get a respite from the people who are around them.

They just need that escape for a moment, and that tunnel kind of can kind of serve as that escape point for them.

>>You have a beautiful space here at St. Joseph Villa and this garden got started a number of years ago.

Will you please share with me the history of this location?

>>At one point, what we're standing on, it was a sand volleyball court and a bunch of clay with construction vehicles parked on it.

We looked at this space and we said, "What can we do here that could benefit our students?"

So about 10 years ago, we took the whole entire area, leveled it, and literally built up from the dirt up what we have today on campus here, and basically it became a learning therapy and production space for our students on campus.

>>Wonderful.

And I'm seeing that the students have so many different things to engage.

You mentioned to me earlier about a production part of your garden.

Can you expand on that for me?

>>So everything you see here in our garden beds, the kids have had one opportunity to plant, water, or just just weed around the plants that you see here.

But after we're done getting them to grow up a little bit, we might use this stuff in our various activities, either through our cooking classes or through science classes.

Everything you see here can be used in one way, shape, or form in whatever space we have on our campus for our students.

>>That has to be exciting for the students to see things grown up; they've planted it from seed and then they grew it up and then they get the chance to actually utilize it.

I understand too that you mentioned that you provide these to families that have need?

>>Yeah.

We actually can harvest our spinach, our lettuce, anything that's in here, and send it home with the families with their grocery bag every week.

>>Oh, that's fantastic.

But what other things do the kids can connect with, touch, feel, taste?

>>So as you walk up from the northern side of the garden, you actually walk through a production space.

In those spaces, you have vegetables, you have some fruit trees up that end of it.

When they walk through in the morning, they come out of the buildings, they can actually grab the fruit off the tree; and if we have a pear, they can eat that pear after they wash it off.

And we have like tomatoes, cherry tomatoes up the end of the garden, and some of the students when we have those cherry tomatoes, they'll actually eat multiple tomatoes in one sitting, >>Wonderful!

>>and it's just a really cool experience for them to try something new, try something different.

So we can actually have them do that here on our campus.

>>Cheers.

>>Cheers!

>>What it taste like?

They don't even got no flavor for real.

>>You gotta eat the whole thing.

>>The whole thing?

>>Because the flavor I've found is in the stem and like the bottom.

It's like sweet.

How was it, Iker?

>>Flower.

>>It's good?

(laughs) >>Yeah.

>>One of the big tenets of the Villa is just to meet our clients and our students where they are and we do that in the garden as well.

So varying levels of difficulty in terms of one step, two step, three step directions.

Some of our students are actually hand-over-hand watering.

Do the best thing for the individual student; meeting them where they're at.

>>Good job, buddy.

>>Something as little as picking up a pile of leaves, putting it in a wheelbarrow, and then transferring that to the compost, that is a success for some of our students.

Just having them outside is a success: having them here, listening to the birds, smelling our mint, even just trying a Blackberry, that's a success on a micro level.

And then on a macro level, just creating the space for community and having a good time; that's a success for me, that's what I'm looking for, just that relationship.

>>Last year, you got greenhouses added, and I know that the students get an opportunity to grow most of the things from seed.

Can you please expand on what you guys actually do in your greenhouse?

>>This now allows us to year-round gardening.

So typically, we had to stop gardening when it got cold, when it got rainy, and now we can actually have, we have solar panels that we can utilize on top of those greenhouses that provide power for us to do year-round gardening.

We kind of have a lab space on the one greenhouse where it's really grown to see it's putting together the plants for our spring produce.

And then the other tunnel, we're trying to help teach them the job skills on how to create flower arrangements.

Growing our own flowers behind the greenhouses, bringing the kids inside of that greenhouse and actually creating those bouquets.

We recently had a prom, and at the prom, we actually had all of our own flowers for the bouquets, the boutonnieres, and things like that for the students.

>>That had to be exciting.

Now tell me more about the skills that the kids are translating or learning from the garden.

>>I think the biggest skill is working together as a team.

One of the biggest things we've heard from our community partners, especially in the workforce, is most adults and young employees are having difficulty working together.

So if they're coming together as a team aspect, they're actually working through those issues: conflict resolution on the job, showing up for the job on time.

Those are some of the biggest things that they have to utilize, and then all the other life skills come into play: raking and sweeping, wiping down tables.

They all are a part of life skill building too, and then you add on to those life skills.

Well, if you want to get involved in the garden, now you're planting a seed, you're watering the seed, you're weeding around the seed.

Eventually, you're gonna harvest that seed and maybe cook it in our restaurant environment that we have here on campus.

>>As they do each step, they're actually learning skills that translate to other areas of their life.

>>Absolutely.

>>Wonderful.

>>And it helps us make the connection for the student once they leave us, or once they transition back to public school.

We can work with our community partners to say, "These are all the skills these kids have mastered here on our campus.

Let's help support you in your next phase of your development as a student, or as a young adult.

>>You have a beautiful sensory garden behind us.

The students have such an opportunity to learn so much in this space.

Please share with me what they're learning and how they can connect with nature.

>>The coolest thing about the sensory garden is from the moment you step in the garden, you start to smell the different herbs we have, from the rosemary, we have lemon thyme, we have some curry back there.

The students actually get to experience that touching, feeling, learning that bugs are not bad and is a good thing, learning about pollination and how important it is that we have bees and bugs to do that pollination.

So it really serves as not only just a learning space but a production space, but therapeutically, it gives an oasis away from the other areas of the garden too.

>>So when your kids need to de-stress a little bit or de-escalate maybe some of the emotional stresses that they're undergoing, they have different areas in the garden to escape to.

>>Yeah, and I kind of look at the whole entire campus as an opportunity for not just training but also therapeutic spaces for our students to be able to say, "I need a break for a moment."

And that helps them process those feelings and emotions until they can develop better coping skills to handle that behavior next time.

>>A lot of learning seems to be happening here and as well, the kids get an opportunity to relax, de-stress as we say, and find different ways to just be at peace with their surroundings.

>>It's also a great space for us to have activities for the kids to engage with each other from different services.

For example, on Friday, we're having karaoke underneath our outdoor classroom with the students while we're drinking tea that we've made from our own chamomile from our garden here.

So that allows us to incorporate various techniques into our learning processes for our students.

>>Thank you for sharing your garden here with us at St. Joseph Villa.

>>You're welcome.

Thank you for coming out.

>>First garden, then take a break.

>>First garden, and then we're gonna have lunch.