Project Overview

Reports

Commodities

• Additional Plants: flowers

• Animals: bees

• Community and Urban Pest Management: food preparation, safety & storage, institution/shelters/municipal buildings/public places

• Ecosystem: Ecosystem

• Pollinators: habitat, honey bees

Target Pests

Practices

• Pest Management: cultivation, cultural control, mechanical control, mulches - general, pesticide application timing, pesticide resistance management, prevention, sanitation, weed ecology

• Crop Production: cover crops, crop rotation, cropping systems, fertilizers, irrigation, nutrient management, pollination/pollinator health/habitat, water management

• Soil Management: composting, organic matter, soil microbiology, soil quality/health

• Sustainable Communities: urban agriculture

The mission of Michigan State University (MSU) Extension is to extend knowledge gained through research out into the community. Encouraging adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) principles by community members is a primary effort of MSU Extension. There are gaps in educational, certificate programming that limit our ability to teach IPM principles to (1) beginner gardeners, (2) urban gardeners, and (3) historically marginalized communities in Michigan. Funding from this grant will enable us to develop a 3-session course—Healthy Urban Gardening—that teaches IPM principles to beginner urban gardeners. The course will be developed in partnership with Young People of Purpose (YPOP), a community-based, non-profit organization serving largely Black communities in Jackson, Michigan. MSU Extension will provide a certificate of completion for those completing all three sessions.

This project will involve frequent travel to Jackson for planning and curriculum development, for development of the garden site optimized for teaching IPM, and for teaching the course. We have limited this to 3 sessions to ensure we have time to develop and teach the course during the funding period. The course will be taught in 2024 at the YPOP IPM garden site, but that will serve as a pilot and be used for recording photos and videos of instructors and participants to be used in developing a curriculum package. Our final objective is to develop this curriculum package as a complete package for other educators to teach this course more broadly throughout Michigan. The package will include an instructor’s guide, marketing materials, PowerPoint presentations, hands-on workshop materials, and supplemental videos and photos.

Objective 1: Strengthen collaboration, communication, and capacity as MSU Extension and YPOP work together on environmentally responsible urban gardening with historically underserved communities in Jackson, MI.

Objective 2: Develop urban IPM curriculum to improve access of urban and historically marginalized communities to IPM content