This year’s campus community garden was a lesson in sustainable agriculture
By Caroline Crawford
At the start of each new academic year, campus is filled with the typical sales opportunities for lofts, refrigerators, posters and jewelry. This year, in addition, up cropped a farm stand filled with fresh baby lettuce, cucumbers, flowers, herbs and more, all grown in Saint Michael’s community garden.
The community garden, located on college land across the road from main campus and down the hill toward the Winooski River, was started last year as part of the college’s efforts to teach sustainable behaviors, encourage environmental stewardship and to give employees an opportunity to grown their own organic produce.
This year, instead of employees each having individual plots at the garden, the area was converted into one large garden that was tilled by the grounds crew and then planted and tended by Heidi Lynch ’10 and Frank Huseman ’11. “This way we can practice crop rotation and take a more organized approach to the garden,” said Heather Ellis, sustainability coordinator and the garden’s overseer. The produce they grew—which included beans, corn, squash, snap dragons, sweet peas, pumpkins, onions, chard and peppers—was started from seeds purchased by the Outdoor Volunteer Efforts campus group (OVE) and was made available for sale (by donation) to the campus community.
“The garden tells us what to do and when to do it,” said Lynch, who had worked at an organic vegetable farm in Rutland before coming to Saint Michael’s as a student. Huseman’s previous gardening experience was at his home in Colorado, where he tore apart his parents’ backyard to make a terrace garden in high school.
Despite a mostly cool, wet summer and a lot of trial-and-error learning, they coaxed copious amounts of vegetables, herbs and flowers from the ground, and in the process learned a tremendous amount about organic agriculture. Lynch, an art major and global studies minor, painted cheerful signs that marked the different areas of the garden. Both she and Huseman say that the summer’s work has them considering careers that involve agriculture and environmental stewardship in one form or another.
Ellis’s plans for next year’s garden include seed-starting in a green house, adding a better fence—“We had some issues with deer, rabbits and turkeys,” Huseman said—and continuing to improve the soil quality. “We’re very aware that soil is the most important thing,” she said. Proceeds from the farmstand go back into the garden’s budget so that it can be a self-sustaining project; the students’ work is funded through work-study dollars and a stipend from the Office of Academic Affairs.
Carrots were the garden’s biggest growing success but, Ellis said, “The real success is that the garden is here.”
