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How does our garden grow?


Bell pepper
Originally uploaded by Clint Gardner
At Salt Lake Community College, where I teach, I've had the honor of first volunteering with our new Community Garden, and now being the advisor for the Slow Food/Community Garden student group. For a few years now, I've wanted to do something like this, but kept putting it off because of professional commitments. I'm happy that SLCC students got on the stick and pushed this project forward.

The Community Garden involves various departments and clubs on campus such as the Thayne Center for Service & Learning, the Disability Resource Center, the Nursing Department, the Environment Club, and Distance Education (to name the groups I know of.) There are other groups involved, so forgive me for skipping your group.

The ultimate purpose of the Community Garden is to educate SLCC students and community members about where our food comes from, learn about our mutual environmental impact, and to provide some of our produce to our new campus food co-op and to other local charitable groups.  As far as the Student Writing Center goes, our goal was to promote thoughtful writing about environmental concerns, so we provided free gardening journals to early attendees.  The Student Writing Center also hopes to conduct readings from those journals as well as other nature/environmental readings during the Thayne Center for Service & Learning weekly garden parties head each Tuesday from 9 until 10 am.

Given our wet and cold spring and a weird case of tomato leaf curl (that doesn't seem to have hurt the tomato plants) I wasn't certain there would be enough produce. The garden, however, kicked in last week and the various garden plots are bursting with produce.  The various group plots have produced everything from broccoli to zucchini.  I'm looking forward to an abundant harvest to give back to the community.

SLCC colleague Paula Michniewicz is blogging her garden experience at Watch My Garden Grow.


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