Going Green @ Haverford

I’m a stickler for neatness. Ask any one of the Grounds guys and they’ll tell you I’m always “encouraging” garage or break room cleaning. On an occasion, when it gets out of hand, I have to assign it, but overall they do a good job.

So, enter Stuart: Center for Peace and Global Citizenship garden intern. He’s done an amazing job on the garden, never has it looked so good. He’s expanded the the number of raised beds and is growing a wide array of fruits and vegetables. Nice job, Stuart!!

So, what’s my gripe? Considering that the garden is surrounded by student and private residential apartments, the original agreement was that the garden needed to be kept clean and neat. I’ve mentioned this to Stuart on a couple occasions and have received puzzled looks. I figured he probably had no idea what I was talking about so I volunteered to work with him to show him what needed to be done.

I was talking about this to my summer student workers, when one mentioned that he had helped himself to produce on occasion. I asked if he gave back to the garden by weeding or watering. He replied, very sheepishly I might add, in the negative. Voila! A solution. So, bright and early on a Tuesday morning, Stuart and my summer workers gave the garden  a good clean. I even managed to broker a deal where we would linetrim around the raised beds weekly in return for vegetables.

I love it when a good plan comes together. Now if only we could prevent the students from peeing….

Here is the second installment of Stuart Hean’s adventures in the student garden.

As of today, June 18th, I feel like I’m finally living up to Phil Drexler’s (2014) frequent assertion that I don’t have a real job. Since my last post, I have been working to fill all of the available space in the garden, with seedlings both purchased and home grown. The raised beds now boast a production capacity that I’m proud of. Watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, eggplant, tomatoes, herbs, peppers and strawberries constitute much of the new space, while cucumbers, squash (winter and summer), pumpkins, zucchini, garlic, okra, beans, onions, chard and kale are taking up most of the original beds.

I recently handed Claudia $600 in receipts from Home Depot and Orner’s Garden Center (unfortunately they have no official website), that have accumulated through the purchase of seedlings, trellis materials, straw, sprinklers and a new hose. I felt slightly sheepish when I told Claudia how much I have spent. When I say $600 without justification, I feel as though I went overboard. Gardening can be done with the money it takes to buy seeds, a good hoe and cultivator, and the utilities cost that accompanies all the water the plants need. However, when I look at the straw that carpets the new beds, keeping the quickly growing basil hydrated, and the twenty foot arcs of water spewing out of the garden’s three new sprinklers, I feel like I’ve put CER’s money in to a worthy investment.

But sometimes I think I take myself too seriously. There was a party on HCA green last weekend, which took place fairly close to the garden. I was happy that the garden was being used as a gathering space for the community that is forming here among HCA summer residents. I was sad to see in the morning however, that some party-goers had trod on the cucumbers and peed on the zucchini. I’ve received a lot of praise for my work so far, and it feels like the community appreciates the garden, but based on this experience, it makes me wonder if the people who don’t speak up in favor of the garden could care less about the well being of the space.

Despite the haters, the praise I have received for my work so far has fueled the generation of even loftier goals. Someone asked me yesterday what I think about during the more mundane tasks that go with garden stewardship. I answered that I think about how to make gardening more exciting, namely through expanding the space, and the impact that the space has on the community. Before I graduated high school, a family friend hosted a dinner for a group of college students and recent graduates who were working for,Pick Up America an organization whose members walk along America’s major roadways picking up trash. The organization’s campaign is impressive in the dramatic inefficiency of it’s mission. A few hundred Bohemians traipsing across the country can hardly hope to clean up the nation as quickly or as efficiently as state and federally funded prison laborers might be able to. But because these unreasonably idealistic young people believe in their purpose and do it for free, they are able to have a significant impact, not only because they actually do clear hundreds of tons of trash from roadways every year at no cost to taxpayers, but because they serve as examples of those who find value in creating, or contributing to movements that are not yet institutionalized, or re-forming institutional practices that do exist, but are perceived as flawed. In contrast to commercial farming, small-scale gardening is similar in this respect. It is not very efficient to spend a majority of my day working a plot to produce what will supplement the diets of close to one hundred students, who may easily ignore the free fresh produce because they can acquire the same fruits and vegetables at a local supermarket for a cost diminished by the convenience of the one stop shop phenomenon. But it feels like an important step in the direction of making Haverford a place where local agriculture is an important part of the institutional culture. I feel very fortunate to be working in an environment where the potential to affect institutional culture is salient.

It feels strange to that the bulk of my work in the garden is coming to an end while I still have six weeks left in the summer term. I want to keep up this momentum, I want this garden to be important to the Haverford community, and I want local agriculture to be part of Haverford’s institutional culture, but I’m not sure how this is possible. Part of me thinks that I should sneak in to facilities one night, hijack a tractor, and till up all of HCA green so that in the morning, our residents wake up to a small farm. Another part of me wants to make find a way to have HGI produce go directly to the Dining Center. The latter thought is more realistic, but the size of the garden is such that the former might need to happen before such a thing is possible. While I mentioned earlier in the post that I’m proud of what I’ve done so far, I see so much more room for improvement. The garden is at an interesting point in its capacity, where it can do more than garnish the plates of Haverford residents, but less than feed them.

That’s all for now, I’ll update soon with where I decide to focus my efforts. See more pictures of recent developments below.

Stuart

The student environmental group, Earthquakers, has been ruffling a few feathers. In fact, they kept Facilities Management running the entire spring semester.

The sustainability program at Haverford employs two students as ‘Energy Czars. It’s a quirky little job. Each evening students patrol campus, checking to make sure lights are turned off, sinks aren’t  dripping, windows are closed etc. They also check building temperatures, which is where facilities enters the picture. Protocol is, that if a temperature is significantly out of range (80 degrees) the Energy Czar sends a list to the work order system and it’s adjusted remotely. Well, they were inundated with emails. It ended up that they had to have someone work on it for an entire day to make sure all temperatures were reset. Other responsibilities include slipping notes under doors urging offenders to turn off lights when they leave. My email in box received so many messages, I decided to change the contact information and direct them to the Greening Haverford site. A drawback of working on a very small campus is that everyone knows who you are. I was getting flagged down left, right and center questioning why we were doing this. The credit for stirring the pot goes to Charlotte Lellman and Jasmin Parker. Nice job!!

Another project they spear headed was researching alternatives to paper towels on campus. They would like to see the removal of paper towel dispensers currently in residential and academic building to reduce Haverford’s carbon footprint as well as cost to the school. Their action plan consisted of installing one Xcelerator hand dryer to compare costs and energy use with new paper towel dispensers installed elsewhere on campus. They also proposed installing cubbies and hooks to encourage students to build their habits around using their own towels. Credit here goes to Lydie Costes, Eve Gutman and Sarah Wolberg.

Congratulations to a semester well done!

For more information about Earthquakers, their projects and member ship, visit the website below.

www.haverford.edu/greening_haverford/student_environmental_groups/earthQuakers/index.php

By Stuart Hean-Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Intern, Summer 2012

Hello, this is my first post in which I will make an effort, perhaps inadequately so, to describe all of the exciting developments that have been happening around the garden since I arrived back at Haverford for the Summer on May 20^th. I spent a week at home, discussing my goals, plans and sometimes-unrealistic visions with some of the more pragmatic and experienced agriculturalists in my family. Their feedback was supplemented by my own prior experience; I created a garden last summer. I cut the weeds with a machete, tilled the earth, put the seeds in the ground and proceeded to wake up at 11:30 am, full of inspiration, to find that I could manage to bear the summer’s heat for upwards of ten minutes a day. Needless to say, the weeds became overgrown, and the wild reclaimed the garden that I had originally held grand aspirations for. I acknowledge that this was a failure, but perhaps I don’t give myself enough credit. There were some days when I could harvest a few watermelons and several pounds of tomatoes and peppers, but it is fair to say that my first garden did not reach its full potential.

Today is Thursday, June 7^th, and I am close to concluding my third week of work in the garden. The week between the end of classes and the beginning of the summer term was critical in establishing my motivation for this project, and so far I believe I have lived up to my expectations. In 2010, Andrew Bostick and many dedicated volunteers and members of the Haverford Garden Initiative established an impressive set-up, consisting of four permanent raised beds, approximately 25 feet long and 3.5 feet wide, and one non-permanent raised bed, approximately 25 feet long and 15 feet wide.

After I arrived and moved all of my college belongings from HCA 26 to HCA 10 with the help of a giant rickshaw, I then went about installing the remainder of the fruit trees leftover from a planting day organized by the Committee for Environmental Responsibility. These trees have been planted all around the perimeter of the Haverford College Apartments, and should begin bearing pears, cherries and apples in a few years.

I then went about preparing the garden for the summer’s growth. There were several crops that had impressively survived through the winter, but were unfortunately inedible. I pulled beets, string beans, bush beans, kale and broccoli out of the ground and proceeded to re-till the soil with a long  handled manual cultivator after adding some student generated compost to re-juvinate the beds’ nutrients.

The rest of the remaining crops, lettuce, chard, spinach, arugula, and radishes were thriving and ready for harvest. I invited the students living in the apartments for the summer, and the faculty that I interacted with by chance to come and grab salad fixins’. By the time the greens had gone to seed I was surprised to see that

the Haverford community hadbarely made a dent in the amount of produce available. I took home ten pounds of radishes myself, and passed another ten off on a friendly dog-walker named Suzanne. I am grateful to be living with an inventive cook this summer, Avi Bregman ‘14, who quickly discovered that radishes are highly edible after being steamed, buttered and salted.

The greens going to seed marked this garden’s transition between spring and summer, a process that has continued as the peas and some golden beets have become ripe. In the past two weeks, I have planted and impatiently enjoyed watching the summer squash, cucumber, zucchini, winter squash, tomatoes, beans, onion, shallots, chard, kale, okra, basil, mint, rosemary, pepper, watermelon, cantaloupe, eggplant, pumpkins, and strawberries grow centimeter by centimeter.

In line with my goal to expand the garden as much as possible, I have constructed five new raised beds. Three are 8 feet by 8 feet, and two are 6 feet by 6 feet. Claudia Kent, the Assistant Director of Facilities Management told me that when they were first established, installing the raised beds required close to fifteen students, to cut, drill and dig. I suppose I am fairly lucky then because I’ve been provided with raised bed corner connectors, that make it much easier to construct the beds. The process of bed construction for me entails digging the soil to a depth of 1 foot with a pick-ax and shovel, and asking Claudia to deliver a couple bucket-fulls of 50-50 top soil compost mix with the back-hoe.

Many of the late summer crops, eggplant, cantaloupe, watermelon and pumpkin are still growing in the greenhouse and I hope these new beds will provide convenient homes. Though, there are close to 200 seedlings in the greenhouse so there may be some more tilling required in the near future. Claudia has been incredibly helpful so far. She has encouraged me to wake up early, and has taken me on several trips to the local Home Depot to pick up lumber for the new raised beds. Additionally, she ordered a new shed for the garden, which I constructed last Friday with the help of a friend, Harvey Fulton ’14. She has also made funding available through the  to cover the cost of miscellaneous garden needs such as seeds, seedlings, garden markers and trellis materials.

That’s all for today, I hope to post again soon with news of further progress.

The Committee for Environmental Responsibility in collaboration with Go By Bike is pleased to announce that this fall the Haverford College Bookstore will be carrying a selected range of bike supplies.

Come in for bells, locks, lights reflective tape, patch kits and yes, a selection of sumo wrestler, pink cows and parrot bike horns.

This fall, the two committees will be rolling out an entire program of bike related events. Safe cycling classes, bike sale and bike repair clinics.

Stay tuned for more details.