Apr 22, 2009

And Now I Am One Of Those Crazy Hippie College Kids

We spread a bazillion wheelbarrow loads of compost! And just look at those fence posts! Put 'em up myself (with the help of a few teammates).

Today is (was) Earth Day! To celebrate, I was supposed to finally plant seeds in the community garden my school's EcoSense club developed. This is the garden's first year, and expectations are high but I'm worried that we won't be able to get stuff into the ground in time since it's been so rainy and muddy (read: really, REALLY muddy). Today's intention was to picnic out by the garden plot and sprinkle cucumber, carrot, basil, eggplant, sunflower, marigold, lettuce and pepper seeds around. My partner and I got there, and there was a reporter waiting for us and a whole lot of mud.

So much care has gone into this garden so far! I've got a real attachment to that 100 square foot plot - I helped put up the deer fence and wheelbarrow half a ton of dirt over it. I even did my first on-camera interview about that garden!* The garden will, hopefully, be a place where students, faculty and local elementary school students can congregate and enjoy the community atmosphere that surrounds sustainably raised food. We're hoping to eventually divide the garden up into individual plots for faculty members/classrooms/student groups/departmental offices to take over while maintaining a portion of the garden for community outreach and education purposes. There's a nifty little patch of grass that could make a nice picnic area or herb garden, too! The place has got tons of potential...

...and also tons of mud. Such is the nature of gardening, I guess.

We ended up putting the row markers and leaving it be. I rolled around in the mud enough on Campus Beautification Day, anyway. Maybe this Earth Day was, for me, a bust, but we've gotta remember that EVERY day is Earth Day!

*I am pretty good at talking to reporters (especially if I know all about what I'm talking about!) but I got all nervous for the on-camera stuff and then the reporter asked a difficult question: Why is it important for young people to be involved in sustainability and green movements? I sputtered a response that included things like "setting patterns for the rest of our lives" and "creating an Earth worth inheriting for our own children" which sounds good written down, but not when it's spoken through a nervous, dirt-encrusted, visibly sweating college kid. Maybe I'm a hippie now.

1 comment:

Lehigh Valley Transplant said...

Is this on AU's campus somewhere?