Edible Campus: Organic Farming and Community Gardening

Evergreen is well known for its organic farm and community gardens, and there is demand for more socially inviting edible landscapes across campus to gather, grow, and learn together. This program is designed to introduce students to the national movement to create edible campuses through case studies, applied science, and management of small farms, community gardens and edible landscapes while putting our learning to practice on the Evergreen Olympia campus farm and campus. Fall is the harvest season, and work appears to be winding down on farms and community gardens. From the grower’s point of view, there is still much to be done — from harvest and crop preservation, season extension activities, planting cover crops, analyzing harvest and financial data, planning for the next growing season, maintenance and repair of physical infrastructure and tools, and more. Successful planning and growing organically also requires learning the principles of agroecology, horticulture, and applied quantitative skills; this program will introduce all students to these fundamentals while each student will choose the primary context of their practicum work between market farming or community gardens. 

In learning and practicing the foundations of agroecology, we will focus on agroecosystem diversity and species interactions, soil science, recycling resources, cover cropping, and season extension techniques for small-scale organic farms and gardens. In the principles and practices of horticulture, we will focus on the growth and management of edible annual and perennial plants well suited to farms, gardens, and food forests in the Pacific Northwest, coupled with garden layout, infrastructure, tools, and site assessment techniques to analyze growing conditions and guide plant selections. We will also explore the human dimensions of co-creation, knowledge-sharing, social values, food traditions, governance, and solidarity-based economies to provide a holistic understanding of agroecology as a system of inquiry.