The garden at the foot of the hill: careful planning, hard work, and a woodchuck named Buttons
By Gordon Brown
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2005
It’s 6:00 a.m., more or less, on a summer Friday morning, and
John-Paul Mial, ’05, Ben Pauli, ’06, Alex Weck, ’06,
and Anna Suechting, ’08, are harvesting (photo). This week,
it’s basil, three kinds of carrots, two varieties of cucumbers, some
zucchini, some petit pan squash, and three different types of beans, plus
beets and two sorts of turnips. Saturday morning at first light, they will
be back
here in the garden, getting all that produce ready for sale at Appleton’s
Farm Market, downtown on College Avenue.
Stand at the top of Union Hill and look toward the river. There, at the bottom
of the slope, neatly fenced and meticulously laid out, is a fledgling experiment
in sustainable agriculture. The gardeners would be open to suggestions for
a more dignified acronym, but for the moment it is the Sustainable Lawrence
University Garden (SLUG).
Despite some local speculation to that effect, Lawrence has not launched
an agricultural program, nor branched out into herbology à la Hogwarts
School. What we have here is an example of what happens when classroom learning
leads to practical application.
The course
It started in Environmental Studies 300: Symposium on Environmental Topics. A required core course in the curriculum of the interdisciplinary major and
minor in environmental studies, ENST 300 is
centered on an annual symposium that brings to campus nationally recognized
experts on a specific topic who
deliver public lectures and also meet with students in the seminar class,
who have already read and discussed the visitors’ published works.
In 2002, the topic in ENST 300 was “The
Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes.” This
year, it was “Sustainable Agriculture,” and the guest lecturers
and their topics included Fred
Kirschenmann, director of the Leopold Center
for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, “Challenges and
Opportunities Facing Agriculture in the 21st Century”; Gregory
Peter, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Fox
Valley, “Who
Grew Your Supper? Sustainability, Sense of Place, and the Legacy of the Land”; Jerry
DeWitt, coordinator of the sustainable agriculture extension program
at Iowa State, “Organic
Farming in the Midwest”; and Amy
Kremen, a former assistant at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
Program, “Federal Legislation on Organic Farming and Food Labeling.”
The
Winter Term lecture series featuring those four speakers was sponsored by
the Spoerl Lectureship in Science in Society, established by Barbara Gray
Spoerl, M-D’44, and her husband, Edward.
The planning
Jeffrey Clark, associate professor
of geology, who has been working with the students to plan and create the
Lawrence garden, defines sustainable agriculture
on three fronts. The first is the “land ethic,” as articulated
by Aldo Leopold; the second is that it is economically sustainable; and the
third is that it sustains the local community.
After hearing from the outside experts, Clark says, the students of ENST
300 turned to each other and asked, “What could we do here that perhaps could
help?” That question led to many others, as the class divided into
ten groups to undertake a feasibility study.
Step one was to avoid re-inventing the wheel, by consulting with other colleges
with similar projects — there are some, but not many. One clear finding
was that the schools that were most successful had garden plots that were
visible to their campus communities.
“We had other possible sites,” Clark says. “We could have put
it south of the river, near the athletics complex, but we wanted people to
see it. This is why, for instance, the first small demonstration plot was located
near the Downer Commons dining facility. We want people to make the connection.”
Other feasibility-study groups surveyed campus opinion and attitudes about
the project, looked at which campus and local groups might be interested in
participating, pondered the question of what to grow, studied the chosen site
and determined what would be needed to prepare it, and considered the labor
issues: how many people would it take to make the garden work, what compensation
might
be offered them, and what kinds of training would be necessary. Finally, a
five-year budget was developed from initial estimates of what the garden might
cost.
The garden
It’s a pretty garden, laid out in neat plots separated by paths covered
in rye grass chosen for its nitrogen-fixing and weed-smothering qualities.
Marigolds are planted around the perimeter to offend and repel insects, part
of a strategy of “integrated pest management” — there are
no pesticides used in this garden.
Which doesn’t mean there are no pests. A few stately rows of corn at
the east end are a temptation to at least one neighborhood resident, a woodchuck
the gardeners have named Buttons. The garden is fenced, but voles, rabbits,
and woodchucks all find their own ways of getting in, a reality the gardeners
face with a certain bemused resignation.
So
far, an estimated 150 students, faculty and staff members, and local residents
have worked in the garden, which is entirely student-run and operated. Volunteering
in the garden was a part of this year’s Earth Day observance, young people
from the YMCA are regular workers, and there are plans for a garden work activity
for new Lawrence students during Welcome Week. (In the photo, John-Paul
Mial, ’05, takes an Alumni College class on a tour of the garden during
Reunion Weekend 2005.)
Monetary support has come from, among others, the Class of 1965 Student Activity
Fund, a local foundation, and contributions from individual alumni and others.
President Jill Beck provided “seed money” (you should pardon
the expression), and a gratifying number of local businesses have made gifts-in-kind
ranging
from bricks to line the paths to a wooden utility shed.
Through the spring and summer, the garden has been operated by one full-time
garden manager, Mial, and three part-timers, Weck, Suechting, and Pauli, who
will be garden manager during the academic year.
The
college’s dining-services department
has pledged to buy produce from the garden up to a specified amount, which
will be increased if the quality
is satisfactory. So far, most sales have been through the Downtown Appleton
Farm Market, although the garden did supply vegetables for one catered event
at
dining services,
with the likelihood of more to come.
There is, of course, a built-in contradiction. Most of the demand for garden
products will come when the students are on campus, but gardens are most productive
at times when the students, for the most part, are not on campus. Still, the
gardeners expect a fall harvest and, next year, an early spring harvest.
Soon it will be time to “put the garden to sleep for the winter,” Mial
says, by planting a “cover crop” — more nitrogen-fixing rye
grass. Also for the winter, a section of the fence around the garden plot will
be removed to permit sledding on borrowed cafeteria trays, one of Lawrence’s
hallowed traditions.
And so it goes at the foot of Union Hill. For more information on the on-going
saga of SLUG, its progress, its prospects, and its friends, please visit its
website. .
Crop report
Carrots > Cosmic Purple, Rumba, Kinibi, Nelson Onions > New
York Early, Red Wing, Ailsa Craig Exhibition, Purplette Cabbage > Primax,
Vantage Point Potatoes > Green Mountain, Dark Red Northland, Red Gold Beets > Bulls
Blood, Golden Bead, Chioggia Lettuce > Red Sails, Deer Tongue, Winter Density
Chard > Bright Lights Cucumbers > Striped Armenian, Olympian Eggplant > Orient
Charm, Bleck Bell Peppers > Sweet Chocolate, Antohi Romanian Tomatoes > Green
Zebra, Striped German, Yellow Pear, Purple Tomoatillo Spinach > Springer,
Spinner, 7-Green Kale > Toscano, Red bore Radish > D’Avignon, Easter
Egg, Shunkyo Semi-Long Salad Mix > Wildfire, Spicy Greens Broccoli > Gypsy,
Packman Cauliflower > White Quasar, Purple Graffiti Turnips > Purple
Top White Globe, Scarlet Queen Red Stem Peas > Sugar Ann, Oregon Giant
Volunteers to plant the garden included President Jill Beck (LU cap) and Rob
Beck (to her right), pictured here at the demonstration plot near Downer Commons.