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GCUOF Prepares For A New Season of Learning and Gardening
April 6, 2011
Like many Canadians enjoying the first spring-like temperatures, Martha Gay Scroggins spent the weekend preparing the garden. Unlike a lot of urban gardeners, those preparations included hauling six trailers of goat manure to enrich the soil at the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming (GCUOF). This, after having conducted a morning workshop on seeds and seeding to a small but enthusiastic group of would-be urban food producers.
“It’s a busy time of year,” says Scroggins, who has been the co-ordinator of the GCUOF since its inception in 2008. Located on a hectare (2.5 acres) of land at the northwestern edge of OAC’s Arboretum, the facility complements the BSc(Agr) major in organic agriculture by offering hands-on experience in market gardening, urban agriculture and resource conservation. Students in horticulture are also benefitting from experiential learning, as are interns and co-op high schools students. The GCUOF has become a community focal point.
“We’ve been growing for the past two years and now have our own seed,” says Scroggins. “Of course, everything has been certified organic so there is real interest in what we produce.” That interest includes volunteers from within the university community and beyond. “Volunteers are a steady source of help over the seasons” she says, adding that their numbers have increased over the years. Scroggins does her best to ensure that volunteers receive some of the bounty as the season progresses. “The Centre has a social role on campus,” she says.
Fittingly for a 21st century farm, that role is supported by social media. Among the volunteers is a social media savvy student who keeps a blog detailing activities at the centre, posting events such as the Saturday workshops, tracking volunteers and posting to Twitter and Facebook.
The Centre’s traditional infrastructure continues to be developed to support intensive production of high quality certified organic food. There is now a year-round greenhouse for teaching, training and production, and a solar array that includes two 250 Mw solar panels will be completed by the end of this month. In addition to driving pumps for irrigation and cleaning the harvest, solar power will support a kinetic sculpture named “Galileo” that has been given pride of place.
The availability of water and the new pumps have been critical to the farm’s viability, says Scroggins. “Institutionally, there is a lot of interest in what we’re doing, but without water, institutionally there is no one to wash vegetables. Mark Kenney in Hospitality Services is interested in our lettuce and cherry tomatoes for campus dining facilities. With the new well head, we will be able to provide food right through the fall. There is a big support of local food and sustainability on campus.”
In addition to the dining facilities, the Centre is an important resource for the very young. The children from the Childcare and Learning Centre have regular visits throughout the season and enjoy hands-on learning from planting to harvest – which they can now clean on-site. “Imagine that,” says Scroggins “That sensation of pulling a carrot straight from the earth and being able to rinse it off and eat it right then and there. So good for the children!”
Older children from a least one local public school are able to participate through the Garden2Table program. Under the guidance of Scroggins and students from U of G’s School of Hospitality, Tourism and Management, students have planted, sampled, harvested, cooked and eaten some of the Centre’s bounty. Garden2Table has been successful in its mandate of providing children with an enjoyable hands-on learning experience about food, agriculture and their natural environment.
Like any gardener, Scroggins has been planning all winter for this season and beyond. “We’ll be growing alot for the fall. The idea is to plant as much as we can to, to maximize food yield, control weeds and for soil amendment.” Like most gardeners, she is also philosophical about loss “ You have to factor loss,” she says “There’s always something: disease, animals, pests or weather. But I’m so encouraged by our volunteers and interns and all the people who are so interested in what we are doing. That’s the real growth factor.”
Saturday workshops for urban food producers continue throughout the season. For a full listing see the OAC events calendar at http://www.oac.uoguelph.ca/news/events.cfm
See the GCUOF blog at http://gcuof.wordpress.com/
