Student gardeners share their bounty

Abby Hird, a fellow in the Longwood Graduate Program, was raised eating homegrown produce from her family’s 1,000-acre ranch in Nebraska.

When she arrived at UD two years ago and set up housekeeping in an apartment, she says she realized how much she missed just-picked corn and right-from-the-vine tomatoes, and she started thinking of ways to have homegrown produce again. The result was a community garden, now preparing for its second season, that Hird and about 15 other graduate students in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences created on the University’s Newark farm.

The garden proved to be so fertile last summer that the students donated 500 pounds of produce to the Food Bank of Delaware, which distributed it to community centers, summer camps, soup kitchens and food pantries throughout the county.

“It was a great feeling to walk into the food bank every week with produce we had grown,” Hird says. “People would get so excited to see us, I guess because they don’t get donations of fresh vegetables very often.”

The garden got its start thanks to Masayuki Shimizu, a soil chemistry graduate student who approached Jerry Hendricks, a plant and soil sciences research manager, about the idea. The next step was to get permission from farm superintendent Scott Hopkins, who moved some research plots around so that the students could have a piece of land convenient to most of their offices. He also made sure it had easy access to water.

Many of the participating students come from international backgrounds and grew plant varieties from their home countries. “One student planted turnips from China that look nothing like anything I’ve ever seen on our farm,” Hird says.

For Hird, it was fresh corn that she missed the most from home. So she planted plenty of it, as well as tomatoes, beans, cabbage, some herbs and sunflowers. She estimates that the garden yielded 2,000-2,500 pounds of produce. This year’s garden will be open to all graduate students in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.