GUEST COLUMN: Campus gardening for sustainable living
Central Sustainability restarts campus garden, invites community participation
CMU student Grace Buchholz, one of the first new gardeners, tends to her plot in 2023. Courtesy photo from Central Sustainability.
By Sydney Thurston
Special to Central Michigan Life
Sustainable living is essential, especially when it comes to food and how we choose to obtain it.
Central Sustainability (CS) is happy to reintroduce the Central Michigan University (CMU) campus garden for this upcoming growing season. While the campus garden was a very popular amenity, it was destroyed by a massive flood in 2017 along with management turnover.
After a collaboration between CS and Facilities Management, a waterline was installed at the garden. Since then, it has been used by students, faculty members and community members during the summer while being managed by the Campus Grows RSO and the CS Garden coordinator.
The campus garden has garden plots that may be reserved by gardeners for a refundable deposit of $15 with communal tools and seeds available. The campus is located west of Lot 70 by the baseball stadium off West Campus Drive.
CS is seeking to make fresh produce and sustainable gardening easily accessible to the CMU and Mount Pleasant communities. Community garden spaces have been incredibly successful on a multitude of college campuses, but the our campus garden ensures affordability and free resources for gardeners who reserve a plot.
Financial struggle, location and resources are all common issues that prevent gardening from being a universal opportunity; yet, CMU is seeking to eliminate all of these concerns for the betterment of the CMU and Mount Pleasant communities.
Gardening is a positive, healthy activity to partake in for many reasons. The personal benefits are the physical exercise: Spending time digging, planting, and weeding is great moderate exercise, especially for those who are looking for additional physical activities, or something less straining than traditional physical activities.
Furthermore, there are numerous mental health benefits to gardening, as it is a very calming activity, along with the fact that belonging to a shared garden space creates a sense of community.
There are many environmental benefits to gardening as well: It lowers the environmental impacts that humans leave on the earth. Even planting a small garden contributes to (reducing) the carbon footprint, as plants will recycle that air to produce oxygen and remove various pollutants.
The soil health greatly improves with the presence of gardeners because the plants cycle nutrients through the soil throughout their growing season.
These effects of gardening all promote sustainability — socially and environmentally — by creating more positive environments for the gardeners themselves and the environment that they affect.
CS is seeking to bring these values to the CMU campus and encourage students to live more sustainable lives by participating in the campus garden this summer. It is incredibly easy to reserve a garden plot, feel free to fill out this form if you have any interest in this topic, or contact CS with any questions at sustainability@cmich.edu.
Sydney Thurston is the Garden Coordinator for Central Sustainability and a first-year student in the neuroscience program at CMU.
