It’s an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in October at 10 AM. Most UMD students are still asleep, but a dedicated group of student volunteers already have their hands in the dirt of the campus Community Learning Garden.
Work hours are hosted on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays at the garden. Meg Smolinski, the Outreach Coordinator for the UMD Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, often facilitates these hours. “If you come to a work hour, you’re gonna get your hands dirty,” Smolinski said.
Planted next to the School of Public Health in 2010, the Community Learning Garden is a student-created, student-run teaching and learning garden partially funded by the University Sustainability Fund. Depending on the season, the garden grows everything from summer squash, cucumbers, basil, tomatoes, and more. The garden serves as an educational resource for students to learn about sustainable agriculture techniques and as an outlet to help alleviate food insecurity on campus.
Amanda Sames, a recent graduate of UMD, was active in the garden for much of her college career and served as the group’s president from 2021-2023. During her fall term as president, Sames noticed that the garden's raised beds were in poor condition. With part of the garden located on a steep slope between Eppley Recreation Center and the School of Public Health, the raised bed area had long provided an accessible portion of the garden to some campus community members who require accessibility accommodations. As the staff and students that coordinate the CLG wanted to preserve the portion of the garden that was accessible to all, they sought to improve this area with the Sustainability Fund grant.
In 2022, Sames applied to the Sustainability Fund and was awarded $30,000 to rebuild the Community Learning Garden’s raised beds. The new raised beds were built during this past summer. They are located on a flat stretch of land at the top of the garden, which has revamped the portion of the garden that is accessible to most.
“We would not have had the funds to rebuild these beds without the Sustainability Fund grant,” Smolinski said. She added that the Sustainability Fund has long played a crucial role in the garden and their efforts to alleviate food insecurity on campus.
For the past seven years, the Community Learning Garden has donated a portion of their harvest to the Campus Pantry. However, food insecurity significantly increased on campus with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“Before the pandemic there were about 70 visitors a week to the Campus Pantry, during the height of the pandemic that number shot up to 400,” Smolinski said.
From that point on, the Community Learning Garden has committed to donating one-hundred percent of their harvest to the Campus Pantry. Passion for this mission to relieve food insecurity in the campus community is shared by members of the garden’s student group.
“Being able to donate everything we have to the food pantry where any [student, staff, or faculty] is allowed to come in and get free food, that’s super important to me,” says Grace Walsh-Little, the group’s current president.
These new raised beds should last about 25 years. “The raised beds we have now, the difference between them is insane,” Walsh-Little said.
Right now, the new beds are filled with a cover crop but in January the student group will host their seed picking event. During this event, club members get to sort through a catalog and pick out which crops they want to plant in the brand-new raised beds.
If you have any questions about the Community Learning Garden or are interested in getting involved in the student group, please contact Meg Smolinksi: msmolins@umd.edu.