Growing Good Deeds: Vicki & Julie’s Mitzvah Garden Magic
Team EarthDance includes growers and good-food lovers of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities. In addition to our current staff and Board of Directors, some are program graduates, former staff or board members, and many are volunteers or neighbors of the farm. When EarthDancers move on from their apprenticeships or official positions, they carry seeds of food and farming leadership.
Recently, Tiffany Brewer, EarthDance’s Director of Impact, spoke with two members of the ‘farmily’ who make the St. Louis area a fresher and more just place to eat. We’re pleased to share their stories.
Vicki Lander, EarthDance’s first dedicated Farm Manager, and Julie Lazaroff, an alumnus of the EarthDance apprenticeship, are friends and farming partners. Together, they lead a community garden that has its roots in the introduction to agriculture they received at EarthDance.
When Molly founded EarthDance on one acre of rented ground, just uphill from Vicki’s plot, the two became close friends and collaborators: the plots became a patchwork of flowers, weeds, vegetables, and harlequin beetles. The following year, Molly assumed the role of Executive Director of EarthDance, while Vicki joined her team as Farm Manager.
The 2010 season brought a huge class of “Freshman Farmies,” 31 aspiring growers, learning organic farming from Vicki, 40 CSA shares per week, two weekly farmers markets, and huge challenges, such as: farming with no irrigation; raising seedlings off-site with volunteer help (during the volunteers’ spring break, the seedlings got fried in the steamy greenhouse) and contending with the farm’s tenacious weeds. It was also a time of laughter, friendship, and pride at what the band of beginning farmers was up to.
A crew of farmers led by Vicki plant the first bed of lettuce at EarthDance’s Opening Day on March 15, 2010.
Amazingly, the story of what EarthDance was doing made its way to the organizers of Slow Food International. Molly and an EarthDance delegation were invited to the Slow Food Gathering in Turin, Italy. For Vicki, the experience was transformative.
Vicki remembers wandering into a session where agricultural elders were giving speeches to the next generation of farmers. As she tuned in through the translation headphones, a woman wearing a headdress made of feathers from three extinct condors spoke of the sixth mass extinction and the urgent need to protect pollinators and biodiversity. She raised the feathers and cast them outward in a sweeping gesture. “Whoosh! It went whoosh right into me.” Vicki felt the message land deep in her spirit.
Vicki Lander, EarthDance’s first Farm Manager.
That moment planted the seed for Vicki’s next project, Flower Hill Farm. After training dozens of new vegetable growers through EarthDance, she didn’t want to compete with the aspiring farmers. She chose flowers, habitat, and pollinator stewardship as her focus—though she never stopped growing food, too.
Flower Hill Farm in Beaufort, MO.
Even as her own farm evolved, the seeds planted at EarthDance continued to send out shoots into other communities. One of those shoots was Julie Lazaroff.
Julie had heard about EarthDance through Vicki, through yoga circles, and through friends who couldn’t stop talking about the farm. A registered dietitian, Julie already loved cooking, eating well, and teaching others how food can be medicine. She had always loved watching things grow. But for years, the timing never quite worked for the apprenticeship program. She was teaching yoga and raising her first child.
Then came the 2016 election. Julie looked for an environment that would ground her for whatever changes were coming. In January 2017, an email arrived about volunteering at EarthDance, and she signed up.
On Inauguration Day 2017, she found herself in an EarthDance high tunnel with a handful of other volunteers. Together they sank shovels into cold January soil and pulled up huge, sweet winter carrots. At that moment Julie knew, “this was going to be a stabilizing factor in my life for the changing times ahead.”
Julie Lazaroff, EarthDance volunteer turned apprentice.
Next, she enrolled in the apprenticeship. She soaked up everything she could: crop planning, soil health, succession planting, pest management.
Back home, she translated that learning into growing vegetables in her front yard, tending herbs on the porch, leading chicken care for New City School’s edible classroom, and volunteering at the Central West End Farm, and the Mitzvah Garden at her synagogue, Central Reform Congregation (CRC).
The Mitzvah Garden at Central Reform Congregation in the Central West End.
The Mitzvah Garden was founded by CRC members Wendy Bell and Steve Werdel. Wendy reports that they were joined by a man who called himself Farmer. Wendy explains, “He just saw us toiling one day at the garden and started helping us. He stayed that spring/summer and then disappeared again as quickly as he had come. Kind of like he had been sent by someone!” Later, another CRC member, Karen Flotte, took over leadership of the garden. What began as a couple of 24-foot raised beds plagued with Bermuda grass gradually evolved into a more substantial growing space with help from Gateway Greening (now Seed St. Louis). The garden grew into a 32-by-32-foot in-ground garden, six 12-by-4 raised beds, and an orchard of pear, apple, and fig trees. When Karen Flotte began talking about retirement, she kept reaching out to people she thought might take over. It truly clicked for Julie when Vicki called and said, “Let’s do this together.”
Today, Vicki and Julie co-steward what they affectionately call a “mitzvah farm.” Technically, it’s a garden, but, Vicki says with a smile, “the idea of a mitzvah garden is: we’re commanded to do mitzvot, which are good deeds. We farm good deeds.”
Everything they grow, sweet potatoes, collards, mustard greens, jalapeños, long-storing crops, and more, goes around the corner to Trinity Food Ministry, which serves hot meals and distributes groceries. Volunteers may taste in the garden, of course, but the harvest is for neighbors in need. It’s farming as service.
The garden is entirely volunteer-run. On small days, they might have five people; on big ones, fifteen or twenty. CRC’s religious school classes cycle through as well. First graders seed parsley to overwinter for Passover, and seventh graders dig sweet potatoes the size of footballs. Some of the same students serve meals at Trinity Food Ministry one week and harvest the food that will stock its tables the next.
This work is steeped in Jewish tradition: harvest holidays, planting parsley for the Seder plate to symbolize both hope and tears, planting horseradish that can both deter harlequin beetles and fill its place on the Seder table. CRC’s program, Menschmakers, supports families with young children to do service projects together. Julie explains, “A ‘mensch’ is a Yiddish term for a completely good person.” The youngest helpers, little ones pushing wheelbarrows of compost, build bug hotels from pine cones and twigs, and decorate birdhouses. Caring for the earth, caring for one another: these are values that Julie and Vicki are proud that the garden can teach.
Around the edges of the main garden, a ring of flowers blooms: sunflowers, echinacea, goldenrod, zinnias, and other pollinator favorites. Each week, Vicki and Julie make bouquets. Some for the synagogue sanctuary, especially during the High Holidays, others for congregants who are ill or grieving, and sometimes for the food pantry itself.
Julie says, “Since the pandemic, there’s been a loneliness in the world. Sick parent, divorce, whatever it is, just a life circumstance that’s a little difficult, [the Mitzvah Garden] is a positive, joyful place to come and be and connect.”
“I feel like I got a fantastic partner,” Julie says of Vicki. Vicki echoes the sentiment, grateful for Julie’s gifts with communication, community-building, and hospitality. They joke about choosing low-maintenance crops to match their every-other-week tending schedule, but under the humor is a clear strategy: grow what will feed people well and store long, without requiring daily harvests.
Through it all, the thread from EarthDance remains visible. The training Vicki poured into 31 apprentices in those early, scrappy years continues to echo outward in gardens and farms across the region. Julie is one of those echoes, now herself a grower, educator, and co-steward of a garden that feeds bodies and spirits.
“We’re not just growing food,”
Vicki likes to say.
“We’re growing community.”
From a trunk full of Swiss chard at a Ferguson gas station to a mitzvah farm where toddlers and elders harvest side by side, the story that began on the Mueller Farm and at EarthDance keeps unfurling. It is rooted in soil, nourished by relationships, and carried forward by every person who chooses to get their hands dirty in service of one another.
