Research

This week I am starting with the abstract and first two chapters of “Connecting Living and Learning about Sustainability: Installing an Edible Forest Garden in Campus Housing at The Evergreen State College” which is a thesis paper by Natalie Pyrooz and saved in the Evergreen Digital Archives, and the introduction to “Food and Urbanism” by Susan Parham.

Connecting Living and Learning about Sustainability: Installing an Edible Forest Garden in Campus Housing at The Evergreen State College by Natalie Pyrooz
Abstract, Chapter I Introduction: An Edible Forest Garden at The
Evergreen State College, Chapter II The Sustainability Movement on College Campuses

I chose to start with this paper because I wanted to look at past attempts to create functioning food systems on campus, and while edible forest gardens are unlike the greenhouse in many ways, this paper highlights the struggle to keep these kinds of spaces running as students move on or graduate, as well as the diverse reasons for these kinds of spaces. Reading this paper should help me gain perspective on what has already been attempted and what kind of goals have been looked at in the past, and help me make informed choices about how I run and structure the greenhouse and the systems around it.

A section from the abstract summarizes the goals and the challenges of the greenhouse quite well despite talking specifically about the edible forest gardens.

“Edible forest gardens were seen as addressing several sustainability issues, including: land use, ecology, food systems, ethnobotany, and bioregional concepts. Perceived benefits of the garden included: support of teaching and learning, further connecting students to place, and establishing student feelings of ownership. It also serves as an example of sustainable grounds maintenance. However, many challenges exist in establishing perennial food producing gardens on campus, particularly in regards to continuity and long-term maintenance, and require careful planning to address.”

This demonstrates social sustainability as a historic issue in campus agricultural sustainability projects due to the nature of the growing seasons, as well as highlighting many social and sustainable benefits to having these spaces for students and faculty. In chapter two Pyrooz cites

“There are several avenues through which sustainability can be incorporated into the campus culture. These include: curricular integration to existing disciplines, operations and facilities, dining, housing, recreation and student life, and at the administrative level (Creighton 1999, M’Gonigle and Starke 2006)”

My goal is for the greenhouse to be a multi-faceted space that works with each students needs, a learning space, a hobby, or a means of getting food. This requires a strong philosophy that applies to the growing within and treatment of the greenhouse, and must be determined before the systems go into place to keep it sustainable. Pyrooz also gives some history on acknowledgments of responsibility for campus sustainability, citing the Stockhold Declaration, the Tallories Declaration, the Thessaloniki Declaration, and the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. They ranged in goal specificity and length, but I think the creation of something similar to the Talloires Declaration alongside specific and regularly updated goals would be of huge use to this project. Evergreens five foci of learning could be used in both the creation of goals, and the creation of this philosophical document.

Pyrooz also makes many references to plans in Evergreens 2009 Climate Action Plan that I had never heard of or I knew had died with no plans to revitalize. I can’t find a climate action plan more recent than the one referenced by Pyrooz, and those goals were for 2020. I would love to know how they planned to assess their progress, if they did, and is there a new plan in the works? Is a ten year climate action plan enough without ten years worth of planning done? Where are our biggest climate and sustainability needs are, who are the stakeholders in that conversation and how do we assess our campus for that?

I don’t plan to read this entire thesis paper, but I will be returning to in over the next few weeks to pull out relevant sections.

Food and Urbanism by Susan Parham Introduction – Convivial Green Space

This reading focuses on many aspects of urban food growing in short 1-2 page sections, providing interesting history and general context around urban growing and convivial green spaces. As well as giving a general timeline of historical and more recent examples of urban growing, Parham also gives some insight into the socio-economic contexts that make it easy to see patterns in the increase and decline of community gardening.

Parham starts with history, talking about the period in which Neolithic villages began building farms to store excess food, which I noted was a sign of human evolution demonstrated through food and agriculture. and lines up with the period in which humans invented the wheel, which would have been the only way to easily transport large quantities of food. Parham also talks about the cities in Mesopotamia that had urban kitchen gardens, signs of shelters for animal husbandry, and a food organization system that kept perishable goods closest to the city.

Moving to the middle ages Parham brings up the practice of using cattle grazing areas and public grounds as one space. I thought this was interesting because in the middle ages that would probably be the norm for most working-class people, having special grazing animals on public lands in cities is currently more common in upper-class areas as a novelty. In Issaquah, the Issaquah Highlands has grazing llamas or something. The middle ages is also demonstrated to have increased general food population with the use of the three-field method and agricultural engineering.

Moving to the 1840’s I read about the arrival or Dutch farmers in Chicago, who not only strengthened the practice of canning and other forms of preserving with the cultivation and sale of their produce, but also adjusted their produce with their market, Parham cites:

“In the twentieth century, lucrative perishable vegetable crops, including turnip greens, mustard greens, collards and spinach greens, were grown to reflect the food preferences of black and white immigrants from the south, displaced by the Depression from their share cropping origins (Zandstra 2004: 120).”

And then:

“Later, with an influx of Mexican families from Texas (originally to work seasonally on Dutch market gardens as laborers, later to stay as urban industrial workers), crops including ‘cilantro, tomatoes, plus many varieties of peppers, such as jalapeños and poblanos, became staples in Dutch farmers’ fields’ (Zandstra 2004: 126).

The greenhouse has the unique capability to adapt to multiple climate types, and has great capacity to grow crops from all across the globe. How many countries of origin can you fit in one greenhouse? How can we best utilize close to home infrastructure to sustainably access food from across the globe?

In the 1900’s Chinese market gardeners added to the number of miners in several gold rushes, Parham cites “These gardeners were associated with the influx of miners to various gold rushes: in Queensland, for example, arriving to work the goldfields at Palmer’s River in the north of that state. Here, Chinese peasants from Hong Kong and Canton arrived by steamer to the remote Cape York region via Cooktown to both pan for gold and to lease space to garden in a location with an acute need for such food services (Jack et al. 1984: 51).” And later “Archaeological evidence indicates fruit trees including custard apples, orange, mandarin and mangoes as well as rough leaf pineapple were grown, and traces of vegetable irrigation ditches remain extant (Jack et al. 1984: 51)”

Parahm then goes on to discuss why in the west we have seen a decline of urban growing spaces in recent years, even when there’s been a rise in hunger in urban and even wealthy (“More recent research findings reinforce the point that even
in countries which are currently the most food secure, the most excluded will be worst affected” (Gorton et al. 2010) areas. A quote cited from Warde (1999: 521) is a very precise summary of one of the biggest issues that I believe faces those working on community agriculture:

“The appeal of convenience increasingly involves appeal to a new way of
conceptualising the manipulation and use of time. It speaks to the problem of
living in a social world where people in response to the feeling that they have
insufficient time, set about trying to include more activities into the same
amount of time, by arranging or rearranging of their sequence.”

Everyone, students especially, are low on time all the time. And not to be a college liberal or anything the the reason is capitalism and the grip it has on the basic survival of Americans. Time is money, and you might save money by growing your own food but if it’s not convenient it’s costing you some of your precious waking hours with your loved ones.

Parahm also mentions allotments, which are mostly found in Eurpoe as a community food production program. I have some personal connection to these as my family used to have one when we lived in England. I remember my parents were very excited when we got off the waitlist, and for a couple of years we grew vegetables and sunflowers. She leads this into talking about urban food growing and public policy, discussing the parameters in place for removing spaces like these, and the recent push to transform community gardening spaces into outdoor leisure spaces. She then gives some history on the use of public outdoor spaces such as parks for outdoor dining, such as elaborate victorian picnics, al fresco meals, and outdoor restaurants.

Throughout a lot of the described history is a theme of placing value on the communal use of outdoor space and human connection over food, and an underlying argument that it is not the love for those spaces that is lost. Over the course of human history food production needs have been in a constant state of evolution, and when it seemed that need went away or was being underutilized the access went with it as the infrastructure was lost. Now it is more needed than ever we struggle with maintaining the infrastructure, making the sustainability of community food system projects not just a local one but a global issue.

Greenhouse and Plant Project

Last week and this week I have been researching and requesting materials for the greenhouse. My plan was to pick up the soil and the plant starts from the organic farm on Thursday and settle them in the greenhouse space that same afternoon, as well as re-measure the space for a workbench top. However, what I did not anticipate was that I actually had not been into the greenhouse at peak sunlight house since May when I had my initial meetings with Daniel, and that the internal temperature of the greenhouse was far too hot for the plants. This was an oversite on my part as I should have done a temperature check before I bought the plants, but remembered the temperature being good in May. Regardless I am working on moving forward.

After some research I have asked for a 40% shade cloth to be ordered, and I bought a small thermometer to I can start to keep track. On Monday I will open the door in the moring and check the temperature at 5:30pm, when I have a meeting there with Beth from the Organic Farm. I am hoping she will have some good advice and that the added ventilation will help.

For now the plants are in my apartment, I think they should be fine in here for a few days and I have a UV light for them. I have two Italian Eggplants, two Cayenne Peppers, two Bell Peppers, and two Lunchbox Peppers. My original order did not involve so many peppers but the Tomatos are sold out. More updates next week!