Amanda Bailey already has dibs on her mom’s Birch Street home, a Cape Cod built in 2005 on the site of an old apartment building lost to fire and across the street from a looming tenement.

Before it burned down, her family lived in that building, and afterward, when it was a vacant lot, Bailey gardened there. It’s where she grew her first cucumber.

The 19-year-old has lived in downtown Lewiston her whole life, between Bartlett and Howe streets. It’s where she played, where she volunteered, and where she has every intention of staying.

She says she’s heard the advice from teachers: “‘See the world.’ I’ve done that; I’ve come back. And I like it here.”

Bailey is a freshman at Central Maine Community College, going to school to be a teacher, ideally at Longley Elementary, her former school.

For the past three summers she has worked for the Lots to Gardens program as a member of the youth work crew and as an intern. With 15 plots across the inner city, Lots to Gardens received early seed money from Empower Lewiston.

Residents plant, weed and harvest, and in recent years have sold their vegetables at the Lewiston Farmers Market, which Empower Lewiston also supports.

Bailey began volunteering for the garden program when she was 9 or 10 years old.

“One of my first memories was learning about manure. We obviously don’t use manure; we’re city kids,” she said. “Our first reaction was, ‘Ew.'”

From manure, it was learning the difference between good and bad bugs.

“I absolutely fell in love with gardening,” Bailey said. She also expanded her palate. If she grew it, she could eat it.

Her job with Lots to Gardens has had her in costume (a blueberry one year, peas another) and taken her on trips to San Francisco and Philadelphia for community gardening conferences.

She’s aware of what some people think of the downtown. In high school, Bailey had a friend who was under orders from her mother: “If she spent the night, she wasn’t allowed to leave my house.”

Bailey thinks the neighborhood feels safer than when she was a girl, more tightknit.

The middle child of three kids, her brother and sister both have eyes on the Maine coast, thinking they’d like to settle somewhere like Harpswell. That doesn’t appeal to Bailey.

“I want to be someplace (where) people are near,” Bailey said. “I know if anything goes wrong, there’s somebody right there.”

She might get that from her mother, Tina, a city councilor.

“I grew up here, this is home and I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” Tina said. “I think Amanda’s roots are as firmly planted in the cement as mine.”