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cross-posted from The American Observer - American University’s Graduate Journalism Magazine

The sight of students donning work boots and brandishing garden equipment amid concrete and steel may conjure up notions of hippie farmers struggling to convert even the smallest plot of green space into an opportunity for gardening.

That doesn’t bother the student voluteeers of EcoSense, though. Members of the campus environmental group are proud of their dedication to sustainability.

“We get a lot of flack from other organizations for being hippies, but we take it as a complement,” Katie Bohri, a sociology graduate student (2011) and AU community garden coordinator, said during a phone conversation while prepping the beds for a campus community garden.

Humble beginnings

The group recently marked St. Patrick’s Day by “going green” in more ways than one.  On the agenda: preparing seedlings for this year’s garden.

Bohri brought egg cartons and re-purposed plastic yogurt containers to incubate the particle-sized seeds that would eventually become the seedlings planted in the garden by the on Campus Beautification Day on April 6.  The bean, strawberry and pepper plants will go on to become the bounty of the 2011 community garden.

EcoSense member and AU sophomore Claire Williamson (Environmental Studies, 2013) outfitted a few cups with bean seeds.  She will be studying sustainability abroad  in Denmark for one semester and will take over the garden next spring.

“I think the garden is a really great way for people to get out and interact with nature and see where we get our food,” said Williamson. “There’s a disconnect between what we eat, where it’s grown and how it’s grown.”

But as Bohri knows, the garden is more than just the fruits and vegetables that are cultivated there. The community garden is a microcosm of the community at-large.  It serves as an epicenter for relationship-building and interaction — a multidimensional learning experience that goes beyond the classroom.

“Getting our hands dirty and doing it together can be really humbling,” said Bohri. “We make different connections with each other than if we were in a classroom – there aren’t any grades in the garden and there’s seldom an opportunity to show off academically.”

Sowing the seeds of community

The community garden began in 2009 with a $1,000 grant from AU’s Eagle Endowment and a bit of coalition building with other partners on campus, including the Facilities Management department.  It’s a relationship that has continued to thrive.

“Actually we were interested from the start,” said Mark Feist, assistant director of grounds, vehicle maintenance and support services. “I really found it coincidental for them to approach us” about the garden.

Prior to establishing the garden, Facilities Management fostered interactive beautification activities involving students and faculty through programs like “adopt-a-spot,” a program that encouraged volunteers to adopt small spots of green around campus and maintain them. The establishment of a community garden was a logical next step.

Feist said that Facilities Management wanted “closer working partnerships with the students. This [garden] was a way to do that.”

After the current planting and harvesting season, the community garden will relocate to a more visible area on campus. Feist said, “This year we’re in the process of expanding the garden. We’ve even been looking at another more prominent spot on campus. We certainly have support to do that on the FM side.”

Aside from relocation, future plans for the garden include programs to engage the surrounding AU community both on and off campus including faculty, as well as eventually ramping up production so that students can depend on harvests from the garden to grow their own sustainable supply of produce.

Gardening outside the campus

While the AU community has been supportive of the campus garden, community gardening off-campus ican be more complicated.

“There’s a lot of emotion and conversation around [planning gardens]” says Katie Rehwaldt, the program director of Seeds That Grow Hope, and co-coordinator of Rooting D.C., an annual community gardening conference that occurs in February.

One of the problems D.C. has is that there is no green space in the District that isn’t coveted by potential buyers. “There isn’t a square inch of earth in this town that’s not worth anything,” said Rehwaldt.

In addition, Rehwaldt said, politicians will publicly support gardens to bolster their political image and then reject garden plans behind closed doors when the positive hype has died down.

Even with all of the political wrangling, the support for gardens is growing. Rehwaldt, who also coordinates her local community garden in the Twin Oaks neighborhood, has seen the interest in community gardening skyrocket in the last 12 months. Last year the wait list to get into the her neighborhood’s community garden was 42 people, this year the list was over 100.

One of the future goals of the AU community garden is to reach out to citizens beyond the borders of campus. Even though the garden is not counted in the garden census commissioned by Rooting D.C., the one thing that all community gardens have in common is the ability to bring individuals together for a common cause.

Published in American Observer, Saturday, April 16, Volume 17, No. 42

Depending on the weather, the project, and the season, you could expect to be:

• digging,
• weeding,
• turning, sifting, or spreading compost,
• making woodchip paths,
• planting,
• mulching,
• picking up trash,
• painting,
• building,
• assisting with special events or programs, or
• performing pretty much any other general organic garden maintenance tasks!!

You can be sure that wherever you volunteer, you will definitely get your hands dirty and your hard work will certainly be appreciated!

If you run a local gardening project that’s looking for volunteers, please email us at DCFieldtoFork@gmail.com so we can get your listings on the calendar.

(dealsfordeeds.com/page/vote)

DC’s Field to Fork Network has been selected for voting on the Deals for Deeds website this week.  Here is the way the process works:
Starting Monday morning (4/11), people can visit http://dealsfordeeds.com/page/vote and cast a vote for which organization/goal they’d like to see featured in the coming weeks. Voting will take place through Friday (4/15) at 5 PM.  The organization with the most votes throughout the week will secure a spot in the coming weeks as the featured charitable organization and receive 5% of all sales throughout the week they are featured.

**Please note that votes will only be counted if they originate from the Greater-DC Metro Region.**

Our goal is to raise $500 to provide monetary support for the Field To Fork Network and ROOTING DC 2012.

PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE NOW!!

In 2011, several of our member organizations will be working with local Farmers’ Markets to staff rotating market booths across the city!!

We are currently seeking a volunteer videographer who could help us put together a short (2-3 minute) promotional video about the project in order to help with our fundraising efforts.  We need to work with someone who can offer their services and all associated equipment usage free of charge – but we can give you/your company a big shout out in our next newsletter (with distribution to over 1,600)!  We are looking to move quickly and finish the video by the end of April.

If you’re able to help us out, please send an email

with subject “Attn: Bea   Re: video” to DCFieldtoFork@gmail.com

Volunteers Needed!
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Join the National Park Service
to help keep the Civil War parks clean.
All tools will be provided.

Fort Foote Park
8915 Fort Foote Rd,
Ft. Washington, MD
10 a.m. – 1 p.m.
For Details: (301) 763-4600

Fort Stevens
1000 Quackenbos St NW
Washington, DC
1 p.m. – 2 p.m.
Ranger Program 2 p.m.
For Details: (202) 895-6070

PLEASE CALL 202-638-1649 TO SIGN UP!!

walk-ups will be accepted until we reach capacity

Let’s say you’ve got a 4×4 board, a big bucket and a bunch of cabbage on your hands.  Whatta ya do?  Make sauerkraut!  On a cold day in January, a few Neighborhood Farm Initiative volunteers spent the afternoon making short “how-to” video clips on making sauerkraut and freezing peaches.  The clips are the first of a series of videos which will give folks tips and tricks for taking full advantage of your garden’s bounty.

Sauerkraut connoisseur Neil Zimmerman walked through the steps of a traditional method for making sauerkraut using salt as a pickling agent.   His simple, age-old recipe highlighted the power of nature to ferment and preserve cabbage and other vegetables to last through the winter months.

The other video we shot that day focused on another way of making fruit or vegetables last past harvest season – freezing!  Using sugar, lemon juice and a freezing container, the basic steps of freezing fruit were explained with fresh peaches as models.

The videos are a part of NFI’s collaboration with the burgeoning Field to Fork Network, an internet-based resource center for DC gardeners.  Once edited, the videos will be posted on Field to Fork’s website for all to see!

Meanwhile, check out some more photos of the film-making here!

Editor’s note: We’d also love to post your how-to videos in our resources section of this site – if you’ve made a video that is gardening or cooking related you’d like us to link to, please email us at DCFieldtoFork@gmail.com

Last year, when the Obamas accepted the offer of a beehive for the White House kitchen garden, Mayor Fenty also opened one of DC’s own youth gardens to beekeeping. In June 2009, a happy family of honeybees began zooming around the blooms at and around the Lederer Youth Garden on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE.  The bees have flourished there, and their presence yielded yet another golden harvest; The Whole Planet Foundation (of Whole Foods Markets) gave DC Parks & Rec a grant of $25,000 for additional gardens at recreation centers around the city, with $5,000 designated for beehives and beekeeping education. Soon, honeybees will be pollinating and supporting the green spaces at 5 additional locations around the city.

Many believe that keeping bees may be the most powerful single contribution an urban dweller can make to the quality and viability of the surrounding environment. Most of us associate bees with crops and farming in rural settings, but every plant that sets a bloom needs pollination, and those plants are the basis for life for the entire spectrum of living things around us. In addition to providing food and habitat, plants which require pollination clean our air and water, and if they do not receive that pollination, they grow with less vigor, shut down for the season sooner, and remove less carbon. DC’s tree cover, green roofs, community gardens, park lands, river basins, window boxes, and herb plots provide more than enough forage for bees, which in turn will provide even more shade, fruits, clean air, and critter companionship for us.

But the DC Parks & Rec beekeeping program does not actually begin with the bees: it starts with the community. DC Parks & Rec is first offering an Urban Beekeeping Seminar, a series of 4 talks from Monday, February 20th through Monday, March 15, for people interested in volunteering in DC’ s public apiaries. This overview will provide just enough background for the would-be(e) beekeepers to work alongside more experienced volunteer beekeepers from around the region, and perhaps to become next year’s mentors.

We also have equipment to assemble and paint, bees from the Virginia Sustainable Honeybee Program due to arrive in late April or May, and sites to set up for the arrival of these colonies. By July, we should have some honey to harvest from the Lederer Bees (and maybe some of the newbees!) and we may be turning some of the beeswax into soap — all with the health and continued survival of the colonies as the primary goal.

This picture is me visiting with a February bee on my roof. She’s a cold blooded creature who nonetheless has to generate heat from working her muscles if she wants to fly, so they often land on me when I am up there in the cold. I think of it as if they are taking a breather, relaxing while scarfing up some mammalian warmth!

I’d like to invite you to contact me (toni@dcbeekeepers.org) if you have questions about beekeeping in DC.

Editor’s note: DC Parks and Rec Beekeeping Class is now full!!!  However, the Bowie-Upper Marlboro Beekeepers Association is offering a short beekeeping course beginning March 4th in Largo, MD.  Find more info about that course here!