Green day

The sight of students donning work boots and brandishing garden equipment amid concrete and steel may conjure up notions of hippie farmers struggling to convert even the smallest plot of green space into an opportunity for gardening. 

That doesn’t bother the student voluteeers of EcoSense, though. Members of the campus environmental group are proud of their dedication to sustainability.

“We get a lot of flack from other organizations for being hippies, but we take it as a complement,” Katie Bohri, a sociology graduate student (2011) and AU community garden coordinator, said during a phone conversation while prepping the beds for a campus community garden. 

Humble beginnings

The group recently marked St. Patrick’s Day by “going green” in more ways than one.  On the agenda: preparing seedlings for this year’s garden. 

Bohri brought egg cartons and re-purposed plastic yogurt containers to incubate the particle-sized seeds that would eventually become the seedlings planted in the garden by the on Campus Beautification Day on April 6.  The bean, strawberry and pepper plants will go on to become the bounty of the 2011 community garden.

EcoSense member and AU sophomore Claire Williamson (Environmental Studies, 2013) outfitted a few cups with bean seeds.  She will be studying sustainability abroad  in Denmark for one semester and will take over the garden next spring. 

“I think the garden is a really great way for people to get out and interact with nature and see where we get our food,” said Williamson. “There’s a disconnect between what we eat, where it’s grown and how it’s grown.”  

But as Bohri knows, the garden is more than just the fruits and vegetables that are cultivated there. The community garden is a microcosm of the community at-large.  It serves as an epicenter for relationship-building and interaction -- a multidimensional learning experience that goes beyond the classroom. 

“Getting our hands dirty and doing it together can be really humbling,” said Bohri. “We make different connections with each other than if we were in a classroom - there aren’t any grades in the garden and there's seldom an opportunity to show off academically.”

Sowing the seeds of community

The community garden began in 2009 with a $1,000 grant from AU’s Eagle Endowment and a bit of coalition building with other partners on campus, including the Facilities Management department.  It’s a relationship that has continued to thrive. 

“Actually we were interested from the start,” said Mark Feist, assistant director of grounds, vehicle maintenance and support services. “I really found it coincidental for them to approach us” about the garden.

Prior to establishing the garden, Facilities Management fostered interactive beautification activities involving students and faculty through programs like “adopt-a-spot,” a program that encouraged volunteers to adopt small spots of green around campus and maintain them. The establishment of a community garden was a logical next step.

Feist said that Facilities Management wanted “closer working partnerships with the students. This [garden] was a way to do that.”

After the current planting and harvesting season, the community garden will relocate to a more visible area on campus. Feist said, “This year we’re in the process of expanding the garden. We’ve even been looking at another more prominent spot on campus. We certainly have support to do that on the FM side.”

Aside from relocation, future plans for the garden include programs to engage the surrounding AU community both on and off campus including faculty, as well as eventually ramping up production so that students can depend on harvests from the garden to grow their own sustainable supply of produce.

Gardening outside the campus

While the AU community has been supportive of the campus garden, community gardening off-campus ican be more complicated.

“There’s a lot of emotion and conversation around [planning gardens]” says Katie Rehwaldt, the program director of Seeds That Grow Hope, and co-coordinator of Rooting D.C., an annual community gardening conference that occurs in February. 

One of the problems D.C. has is that there is no green space in the District that isn’t coveted by potential buyers. “There isn’t a square inch of earth in this town that’s not worth anything,” said Rehwaldt.

In addition, Rehwaldt said, politicians will publicly support gardens to bolster their political image and then reject garden plans behind closed doors when the positive hype has died down.

Even with all of the political wrangling, the support for gardens is growing. Rehwaldt, who also coordinates her local community garden in the Twin Oaks neighborhood, has seen the interest in community gardening skyrocket in the last 12 months. Last year the wait list to get into the her neighborhood’s community garden was 42 people, this year the list was over 100.

One of the future goals of the AU community garden is to reach out to citizens beyond the borders of campus. Even though the garden is not counted in the garden census commissioned by Rooting D.C., the one thing that all community gardens have in common is the ability to bring individuals together for a common cause.