A Greener Rice:
Moving the community garden from Hicks Kitchen to Wiess College will help provide organic foods to students and serveries
Students can expect to find organic vegetables and herbs in their serveries from the Rice Community Garden as early as January. The groundbreaking event for the garden was held Sunday at the southwest corner of Wiess College.
But the community garden is nothing new to Rice. When it was created in 1999, the garden was located behind the Mudd Laboratory in front of Hicks Kitchen. The garden had to be moved to a 375-square-foot plot of land at Wiess this year because the kitchen is undergoing renovations.
The community garden is being tended to primarily by students in BIOS 204: Environmental Sustainability: The Design & Practice of Community Agriculture — a one-credit hour class newly offered this semester. Students in the class are required to volunteer at the garden each week.
Faculty Club Director Ann Swain — who teaches BIOS 204 along with Ecology and Evolutionary Biology professor Jennifer Rudgers — said students in the class will learn basic elements of gardening design, soil types and composting systems.
Swain started the Farmer’s Market at Rice, which brings local farmers to the Rice campus every Tuesday. She said the Farmer’s Market helped her realize that Rice needed to grow its own organic produce, too.
“I was so spoiled from eating things that literally had just come out of the ground,” Swain said. “I thought, ‘We need to do this ourselves, right here.’ So after that I got together with [Director of Sustainability] Richard Johnson and a couple other people, and it got started that way.”
Swain said she was surprised at the number of students who showed up to the first class of BIOS 204.
“At the first meeting, we had 40 kids there: a huge turnout,” Swain said. “We weren’t listed in any catalogues [like ESTHER]. It was just word of mouth and on the Web.”
Jeremy Caves, who is co-student coordinator of the garden along with Wiess junior Roque Sanchez, said the club was popular during its first two years, but in recent years, there have been fewer volunteers.
“Since I got involved my freshman year, there haven’t been a whole lot of active volunteers, maybe five,” Caves, a Wiess junior, said.
But Caves said he believes the decline in volunteers was due to poor advertising.
Having more volunteers will allow garden volunteers to communicate with the serveries to find out what organic foods people want. Additionally, volunteers will be able to expand the garden to different parts of the campus. There are already plans to break ground for a 200-square-foot garden near Sid Richardson College.
At the moment, carrots, onions, bok choy, charred lettuce, beets, basil and garlic are being grown in the garden. Caves said students recently discussed what other vegetables and herbs to grow in the garden.
“Hopefully we’ll plant within the week so by next semester, stuff should start appearing [in the serveries],” Caves said. “And it’ll be a heck of a lot tastier.”
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