Student garden volunteers, UI organizations successfully complete circle of life

	Zebing Wu sautés vegetables in the IMU River Room cafeteria. Photo by Tom Jorgensen.

Millions of people across the world are working hard to protect the environment and its people by “going green,” and groups across the University of Iowa campus are doing their part in the green movement.

One particular group of students—in collaboration with IMU Food Services, the Office of Sustainability, Facilities Management, and the UI Environmental Coalition—tend to vegetables grown in a large garden on the west UI campus and delivered to the University for ingredients in meals.

The garden opened last April in an effort to encourage people to find out where the food they eat comes from and to give students a chance to garden or work towards the University’s new Certificate of Sustainability. The one-third-acre garden is located on Hawkeye Park Road in Iowa City near the Hawkeye Recreation and Tennis Complex and the Hawkeye Drive apartment complex.

The student garden runs on a “circle of life” model—the students grow the food, it is transported and used on campus, some of the scraps are composted, and the compost is used on the garden, along with compost donated from the Iowa City Landfill.

Before the garden was up and running, a group of students received nearly $8,000 from UI Student Government to help build the greenhouse and purchase supplies, says UI junior Jacob Snyder, who helps with the garden. The UI Office of Sustainability also helped coordinate and promote the project.

Richard Geer, the general manager of IMU Retail Dining Services, says he works to provide an outlet for distribution of the produce and he ensures Servesafe protocols are followed so the plants are grown in a safe environment.

Now the garden produces roughly 20 to 30 different items depending on the time of year. Students plant many different types of salad greens, tomatoes, squashes, fresh herbs, potatoes, and more.

Almost every day, someone checks on the garden and adjusts the greenhouse depending on the weather. Three times a week, the crops are harvested and the IMU picks up the produce to use in its menus. The IMU pays market price for the vegetables; that money is reinvested in the garden.

Geer says he features the products on a daily basis and hopes at some point the garden will help feed 100 percent of the campus 100 percent of the time.

“I hope it grows to be a much larger garden in time,” Geer says.

Besides using the produce for items in the IMU River Room, some of the vegetables are used in dishes in catered events and some of the product from the garden is donated to the Johnson County Crisis Center Food Bank.

Two smaller gardens also contribute to meals found at the residence dining halls. One garden is tucked behind Burge Market Place while another garden grows on the T. Anne Cleary Walkway near North Hall and Currier Residence Hall.

Although the gardens only contribute a small number of items to all the meals and dishes found on campus, Geer says the gardens are part of a broader green mission.

“We’re looking one, two, three generations out now,” he says. “We need to be thinking about the future and our planet.”

Geer hopes a minimum of 65 percent of all food will be purchased from local sources within the next two years.

And many others involved with the project hope the garden will encourage others to think more about their food.

“More and more people are realizing they want to know where their food is coming from,” says Liz Christiansen, director of the UI Office for Sustainability. “The student garden is a tangible example of garden-to-table.”

Snyder says many of the students involved with the garden want to make it something that is ongoing and only gets better with time.

“We hope to produce more and more of the food students eat.”

Christiansen says the University is working to change this linear model of using food that is turned to waste and instead work on a loop model. The Office of Sustainability is hoping to recover as many scraps as possible and reduce the amount of waste to have a more efficient use of resources.

Geer believes the garden is accomplishing more than he expected.

“We’ve completed the circle and see it effectively working,” he says.

by Ashton Shurson