UVa mini-garden uniting students, faculty

Above the makeshift basketball court of a University of Virginia dormitory, the rows of organic herbs, spinach and flowers are thriving.
The “urban mini-farm” at Hereford Residential College is getting students involved in agriculture, interacting with faculty outside the classroom and providing them with a learning experience that goes beyond how to plant a tomato.

Dan Michaelson, a third-year student who tends both his family’s and Hereford’s organic gardens, believes the farming practices used at Hereford’s mini-farm can rub off on those who tend it.
“There’s a way to do things in life that takes aspects of the natural world, puts them together and creates a harmony that’s good for you and good for them,” Michaelson said. “I’ve learned as a human being that I was meant to raise food for myself and get my hands dirty.”

The garden came to fruition in 2007 after Keith Williams, an assistant professor of physics, became a faculty resident at Hereford. Getting a chance to interact with students outside class interested Williams, but he knew that he would miss his garden space.
Williams approached Nancy Takahashi, principal of Hereford, about creating a garden there. His proposal helped to fulfill a longstanding dream of Takahashi’s, to create learning
environments on school grounds. Before long, the university’s facilities management staff created a 20-foot-by-20-foot space near the Malone building for the garden.
Today, the organic mini-farm is twice its original size. About a dozen students, faculty, staff and community members regularly get their hands dirty in the garden, learning to compost and manage the harvest. The gardeners also are improving the quality of the soil, which had consisted of an inch of topsoil and a lot of clay.
Hereford’s garden has benefited from a variety of farming and gardening practices. Williams said it is a “companion garden,” which means plants that provide nutrient and bug benefits to one another are planted next to each other.

The gardeners also practice trap cropping, which is growing one plant that attracts a certain pest to save other crops from those bugs.
“The broccoli drew in Japanese beetles like a magnet,” Williams said. “At first I was despairing about my loss of my broccoli, but it kept the bugs away from other plants.”
Williams and Takahashi recently finished teaching a one-credit short course on alternative food production at Hereford. The mini-farm may also inspire future undergraduate theses and other projects.
Hereford’s garden is in line with Thomas Jefferson’s ideals, Williams said, which makes it a perfect project for UVa students.
“It’s a broader experience with social implications,” he said. “Ultimately, it betters the relationship between academia and the community.”
Takahashi added that the garden has erased some of the stereotypical student-teacher barriers.
“We’re all learning from one another and the strict role of teacher and student isn’t so strict anymore,” she said.

Hereford’s garden may pave the way for a larger on-campus project on Upper Nameless Field. Sarah Yates, a fourth-year student who spends some of her free time working at an Earlysville farm, is one of six people talking about creating an urban garden there.
Yates and the others envision starting out with a half-acre plot for the tentatively named UVa Community Garden. Some of the harvest would likely be donated to a local homeless shelter, and community members would be encouraged to help grow the plants. Ideally, the organic garden also would have institutional support from one of UVa’s academic departments.

For now, the group has been getting tips from Hereford and working on getting permission to use the field. Yates said she thinks the existing urban mini-farm will help the case for another.
“It kind of indicates to administrators and academic departments that there is interest in having a garden,” Yates said. “We’re able to point to the involvement that they’re having in their garden.”