Off of West Cameron Avenue in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, tucked between a fraternity house and a parking lot, is Carolina Community Garden. A North Carolina Botanical Garden program, Carolina Community Garden brings together volunteers from across the Chapel Hill area to grow free organic produce for lower-wage UNC-Chapel Hill employees, most of whom are university housekeepers. Through its partnerships with UNC-CH departments, student organizations, and individual volunteers, the Garden has been able to expand access to fresh, sustainably-grown produce in Chapel Hill.
Carolina Community Garden
Ann and Rich Koehler, who have volunteered at the Garden together for over a year, work on capturing squash lady beetles from a bed of summer squash.
Undergraduate UNC-CH student Tasso Hartzog reaches through towering stems to harvest okra. Aside from being a popular vegetable in the American South, okra is also a common ingredient in Southeast Asian dishes. Many among the Garden’s produce recipients are refugees from the country of Myanmar (formerly Burma). To learn how to accommodate diets from Myanmar, Carolina Community Garden reached out to Transplanting Traditions, a refugee-focused community garden largely operated by people from Myanmar. The Garden also shared seed catalogs with UNC-CH housekeeping supervisors to get feedback on what kinds of produce housekeepers would appreciate most.
Volunteer workdays at Carolina Community Garden are two hours long on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday afternoons. Sunday, the busiest workday, often brings large groups of volunteers from student-led service groups and UNC-CH departments. Also among the working hands are individual volunteers who may be working in the Garden for the first time or who’ve worked there for up 12 years, since its inception. Many who volunteer in the garden because they’re interested in food accessibility also find that gardening serves as a useful mental health-keeping activity for themselves.
Carolina Community Garden program manager Claire Lorch and volunteer Sammy Quiroz-Gutierrez take turns guessing the weight of an overgrown bottle gourd. The result: a whopping 18 pounds. Lorch has led the Carolina Community Garden program since its conception. The idea for a community garden was proposed as a way to help struggling UNC-CH employees during the Great Recession of 2008. A social worker by training, Lorch had some experience with small-scale gardening at home but has had to learn much from scratch over the Garden’s lifetime.
A group of UNC-CH employees lines up in preparation for a 7:30 a.m. produce distribution. Distributions are held about once per week depending on the amount of produce harvested from the Garden. Groups of housekeepers are invited to distribution sessions based on their shifts, with typically one or two shifts of housekeepers (15 - 45 people) receiving the Garden’s produce per week.
Claire Lorch hands a chunk of bottle gourd to volunteer John O’Sullivan to prepare for a produce distribution session. O’Sullivan is a retired agricultural economist and a member of the Newman Catholic Student Center, a church next door to the Garden that frequently donates essential supplies such as seeds.
In late August, volunteers at the Garden were assigned to search for and capture squash lady beetles, which are guilty of wreaking havoc and holes on vegetable leaves. As an uncertified organic garden, Carolina Community Garden avoids using artificial pesticides and only turns to organic pesticides as a last resort. To keep the Garden organic, certain plants and flowers are grown to attract “good insects” that help control populations of harmful insects by eating them or spreading a natural bacterial pesticide.
Adelaide Cooke (left), a 2nd-year medical student at UNC-CH, throws harvested peppers to Pedro Lopes de Almeida, a professor of Portuguese in UNC-CH’s Department of Romance Studies. Carolina Community Garden attracts and accepts volunteers of all backgrounds, from elementary and university students to retired community members. The Garden’s program manager, Claire Lorch, hopes to grow an even more diverse volunteer pool.
Three volunteers chop compost, one of the less-envied tasks assigned at the Garden. Outside of Carolina Community Garden sits two bins for community members to drop off compostable goods, such as veggie scraps and flower arrangements. The Garden must be selective about what compost materials it accepts because its backyard style of composting is slower and of a smaller scale than industrial composting. During the school year, the Garden receives an influx of compost from Compostmates, a UNC student group that picks up compost from off-campus students to turn the compost into nutrient-rich soil for the garden.
Pockets of zinnia flowers attract valuable pollinators to the Garden and also serve as a pretty tabletop reward for volunteers. When considering the future of Carolina Community Garden, program manager Claire Lorch thinks of expanding the garden to give some produce beds time to rest and regain nutrients. Already in the works is a partnership plan by the UNC American India Center to create a garden in the space next to Carolina Community Garden’s existing plot. So, it’s safe to predict that the Garden will continue to reap valuable harvests in the time to come.