Students recognized Mental Health Awareness week with a local community gardening event to benefit the university’s campus food pantry on Oct. 5.
The Mental Health Coalition hosted the event, “Harvesting Hope: Community Service in the Garden,” at the Community Learning Garden located between the Eppley Recreation Center and the School of Public Health.
The event started off with a tour of the vast, fruitful garden, which harvests everything from tomatoes to cucumbers to a variety of peppers. Then, volunteers were whisked into work, tasked with watering, harvesting the crops and weighing the final product for the Campus Pantry.
“It’s a similar structure to all of our [usual volunteer hours], but we are just emphasizing how important it is to be connected to nature and the mental health benefits that being outside can have on someone,” said Grace Walsh-Little, senior environmental science and policy major and president of the Community Learning Garden club.
The garden opened in 2010 as a graduate student project and is run by student volunteers and advisors from the Institute of Applied Agriculture and the UMD Arboretum and Botanical Garden, according to the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources website.
Since 2020, the garden has donated all of its produce to the Campus Pantry, a food pantry aimed at providing nutritious food options for students, faculty and staff experiencing food insecurity.
“It also ties to mental health benefits of being able to have fresh and local produce because everything that we donate, we give to the campus pantry,” said Walsh-Little. “It’s a resource that students are able to use and have access to.”
Volunteers and leadership team members have found their way to the local garden from many different paths.
“My first semester at Maryland, I took a class where we came here for one of the class periods and I’ve been trying to come as often as I can ever since,” said Claire Gearan, a senior sustainable agriculture major.
Some already had an interest in agriculture and gardening, like Daniel Feliciano, a senior environmental science and technology natural resource management major and vice president of the Community Learning Garden Club.
“I’ve been working on a farm for six years. When I moved into my house at College Park, I had a gardening area,” said Feliciano. “I wanted to see [a garden] on a smaller scale and I found out about the Community Learning Garden and I was like ‘Oh, I want to learn about gardening to start my own garden.’”
The garden has served as a community for many on campus, being an outlet to forget about school and everyday stresses while providing for the College Park area.
“As a transfer student, when I first came to UMD, I didn’t really know anybody here. The garden was a really good way of meeting, not just people in my major, but people from all over campus,” said Feliciano. “It’s really cool just talking with them and coming out here in the environment. It makes you forget you’re on campus.”
The garden’s mission is to give people an outdoor space to come together and provide produce for the community, as well as learning about environmental stewardship.
“Gardening on your own can be so therapeutic, taking your time and being able to look at all the plants from a whole different perspective,” said Walsh-Little. “It can be really nice to slow down the pace of things. Sometimes life can move really fast and in gardening, it really tries to make you see the smaller details.”