Kalamazoo College's Organic Gardens Want to Harvest Ideals

When I show up to gardening class, a group of about eight students are gathered around a young woman wearing dark sunglasses with her hair held back by a bandana. As Seema Jolly explains some organizational details of the course, her soft voice rings out surprisingly clear; we’re standing in the backyard of an empty house and the space is like a small bubble of quiet, ruptured only by the occasional birdcall. She’s talking about getting a team together for the Farms to K Cook Off, Kalamazoo College’s annual culinary competition where teams prepare dishes using local food. The students are all for it, but Seema reminds them that none of the crops they’ve planted over the past five weeks will be ready in time for the event, so they’ll have to get ingredients elsewhere. “We’ll have plenty of radishes, though,” she amends.

To get things started, Seema tells the class to check up on the progress of the seeds they planted last week. Students fold back the clear plastic sheets that cover certain parts of the plot and peer down at the soil. At first glance, there’s not much to see, with the exception of one flourishing row of radish seedlings. Looking closer, the students spot a few tiny sprouts that will grow into beets, turnips, and lettuce. Seema reminds the class, “A lot of gardening is just observation. It might look like there’s just a lot of dirt on the ground and there’s nothing growing, but when you just spend a little time and look at where you planted, you’ll start to see things sprout up.”

To a newcomer like myself, it looks like slow going. Most of the students are seniors and will have graduated before these veggies are ready to come out of the ground. All the same, they are eager to get their hands dirty, some pulling up the invasive garlic mustard weeds growing on the edge of the plot, some tearing up chunks of sod in their gloved fists to clear more ground, and others using shovels to turn the soil in preparation for the potatoes that will be planted. One student unearths a thick, five-foot-long tree root, and Seema comes over to hack at it with her shovel.

All this hard work for a few radishes and maybe some lettuce, but Seema says the class isn’t frustrated. “When we met for the first class, I told the students that this is a start up garden, so there’s a lot of legwork that has to get put in, because we have to prep the land first,” she explains. “I’ve also told them that the PE gardening class is kind of a beginning step to creating a community effort on campus, and so I think framing it in that way makes it a little bit easier for the students to get on board with this, because it’s going to continue after they’re gone. They really are setting the foundation for a much bigger project than just their ten weeks here.”

Kalamazoo College’s campus is bookended by two gardens. The plot currently hosting the gardening class is at the top of the hill, and there’s another garden at the bottom that’s run by a student organization, D.I.R.T. Both are tucked away, impossible to find unless you have precise directions. Both are attracting more and more attention as the campus ramps up its efforts at sustainability. And both are growing more dreams than their tiny acreage can hold.

For Seema, the dream is self-sufficiency. “I think that now is the perfect opportunity for the college to start producing some of its own food,” she says. The intent of the gardening class was to give extra produce to the college cafeteria. In Seema’s ideal vision, the garden would continue to involve students, faculty, and staff, but it would be expanded to cover more land, with a full-time garden manager who would make the garden productive enough so that it could sell food to the cafeteria. “If this was an income-generating garden and [the food] would be going to our cafeteria, that would be my win-win-win situation: students would be getting better food, the garden would be able to sustain itself financially, and people would be involved in whatever capacity they want,” says Seema.

She has an investment in her vision for a more self-sustainable campus because she went to college here, graduating in 2007. As a freshman looking to get involved in a student organization, she joined D.I.R.T. (Digging In Renewable Turf), a student-run organic gardening club. For Seema, D.I.R.T. sparked the passion that would bring her back to Kalamazoo College seven years later to get her hands dirty once again.

The D.I.R.T. garden is a tiny rectangular plot clinging to the side of the Markin Racquet Center. Ben Cooper, senior K College student and D.I.R.T. co-leader, parks his car in the driveway that cuts off the horizontal strip of a hill where the garden is planted. He gets spades and shovels from a tool shed around the corner of the building, preparing for a garden workday. He’s a Political Science major, but he wants to go into a biology-related field. When I ask him how that plays into his future plans, he says he has a summer internship lined up at Sleeping Bear Dunes where he’ll be monitoring the Piping Plover, an endangered species of bird.

Ben looks like the kind of guy who would monitor an endangered species. He’s tall, lean, and tan, with intense sunglasses and long hair pulled back into a ponytail. He shows off the miniature greenhouse that he and the group constructed out of arcs of PVC pipe anchored by steel rebars and covered by a clear plastic tarp. The design was his mom’s idea; Ben got a lot of his gardening knowledge from helping her as he was growing up.

He weeds the rows of seedlings under the tarp and tells me about some of the challenges D.I.R.T. has come across during his three years as a co-leader: an expensive-to-build fence that keeps falling down, the erosion and nutrient runoff caused by the slope of the ground, having to front the money for projects before being reimbursed by the student government, gardening in the rain, a lack of publicity on campus and a dearth of members.

But during the time that Ben and his co-leader Tammy Pheuphong have been in charge, interest in the organization has grown considerably. The garden’s last workday brought out over twenty students, Ben says, and although I have trouble picturing twenty people working in this narrow, treacherously sloping plot, I’m not surprised. Kalamazoo College’s campus is very environmentally aware: organizations such as the college’s local food movement, Farms to K, and the environmental student organization, Envorg, are very active. The cafeteria went trayless last year, and this year the school had top-five finishes in certain categories of the national Recyclemania Competition for the fourth year in a row. I’m surprised that D.I.R.T. isn’t a bigger deal on campus.

Trace Redmond, a first-year student who will take over the leadership of D.I.R.T. when Ben and Tammy graduate, certainly wants it to be a bigger deal. In his vision, the garden would function more like a city community garden in which various groups would each have a plot, and D.I.R.T. would manage everything in addition to doing their own gardening. He wants to eventually sell produce at the Kalamazoo Farmer’s Market, working with business majors at Kalamazoo College to come up with a viable sales plan. Trace thinks that self-sustainability is an achievable goal for the D.I.R.T. garden, especially since the two biggest costs for a garden, labor and land, aren’t a factor (the college provides land for the garden).

But as it is now, the garden is too small to produce enough food to sell. I asked Trace and Tina, a D.I.R.T. member, how they reconcile their passionate pursuit of ideas with the frustrations of getting a garden off the ground. Both said that for them, the satisfaction comes from knowing that they’re taking action, no matter how insignificant it may seem at first. For Tina, coming to Kalamazoo College and learning about big problems of hunger and environmental destruction made her realize that helping in little ways, such as writing checks or using reusable coffee mugs, wasn’t enough. Gardening is a way for her “to really be on the ground in this do-it-yourself-type way,” she says. “To have a project, to have a space where you feel like you’ve carved out a little area of something good and clean, I think it can just be really satisfying.”

“I think there’s a huge difference between thinking and doing,” says Trace. “In order to completely own an idea, you need to do it. So the idea that ‘I really like organic vegetables’ or ‘I’m behind that idea.’ But until you really go out and do it, you’re going to have a really simplistic concept of it. It’s necessary in order to further goals of eating healthy for people to understand where their food comes from. To really know it on a deeper level.”

On opposite ends of the campus, two groups of passionate individuals are chasing ideals that seem unattainable. But, like the seedlings in Seema’s class garden: the movement has put down roots and sprouted, you just have to look closely to see it.