 "Photo: Courtesy Photo: Lisa Nugent")
On a recent unseasonably cool Sunday afternoon, the Organic Garden Club (OGC) is holding its first ever Work Brunch at their headquarters along Spinney Rd. just west of campus. As you veer left off Mast Rd. in the direction of UNH's agricultural hub, there suddenly appears before you a scattered human mass of Carharts and T-shirts canvassing the dark, rich field.
Close to a dozen cars line the sodden strip between the narrow road and the thick brown fence that serves as the boundary for what is fast becoming the most talked about acreage at UNH. It is an area equivalent to two or three football fields, where by 1 p.m., its warm blooded ploughshares (including five or six leash-less hounds) are hard at work, hammering and tilling and digging and chasing, all to the beat of steel on steel. Stevie Ray Vaughn blasts out the back of a black Jetta and the unmistakable air of collective determination looming gently on the brow-furrowed faces of UNH'S own special microcosm of a bourgeoning organic revolution.
All in all, there are between 15 and 20 people, mostly students, who have come to kick off what hopes to be a seminal year for the infant OGC, and a vindication of sorts for its resident godfather, an energetic baby boomer known simply as "Charlie."
Charlie first appears hunkered over a patch of overgrown grass, sickle in hand, teaching an eager protégé how to properly sheath. Charlie explained the history of OGC- its proverbial roots-providing a keen explanation for what is clearly an upwardly mobile phenomenon at UNH, a mass that has grown four-fold in just this past year, with no signs at all of slowing down.
"The idea is simple," Charlie explained. "Healthy soils create healthy plants, healthy plants make for healthy people, and healthy people make for a healthy planet."
Charlie should know. He is the proud owner and operator of his own organic farm along Route 125 in Nottingham, and his methods and ideals have been noticeably imitated by those students who know him both as employer as well as spiritual contemporary.
While the OGC is still an up and coming club, the seeds for a student run organic garden on UNH grounds were actually sewn back in the '60s, when Charlie began feeding his chicken hatchlings unprocessed organic feed, as opposed to the standard chemically altered swill typically utilized by the Tysons and the Perdues of the industry. After first concentrating on selling organically fed chickens, Charlie diversified, incorporating a wide range of Natural (big N) produce while maintaining a desire to translate his methods into still larger arenas. UNH was such a venue, and the logical point of departure for a potentially explosive movement.
Today, much of Charlie's labor force comes from these eager 20-somethings, who are content to look beyond their considerably meager wages (the standard is roughly $6 an hour) and toward the kind of long term cache of incentives, both theoretical and experiential, that have since been quite successfully relayed a few miles up the road to Durham. Indeed, a good portion of the workforce spend his or her summers biding time between Charlie's farms in Nottingham and Woodman. The Woodman farm is UNH's own horticultural research facility that provides students, at both graduate and undergraduate levels, an opportunity to gain practical farm know-how through work study grants and research projects.
Jenica Springer is one organic disciple in particular who has successfully channeled her experience with both Charlie and the crew at Woodman Farm into the promotion of an increasingly independent, student-run organic garden. She is a UNH grad who has recently returned from a year-long West Coast hiatus to assume the role of organic garden manager.
The garden was initially slated to serve as Springer's senior research project. Her goal was to prove the feasibility of organizing a garden that the most dedicated of students could foster and then maintain while she was abroad. Today the garden is in the best shape it has ever been. They are expecting funding to raise a heated three-bay salt-box shed for tools and cleaning facilities, as well bring in new prepping and cooking equipment better suited to help prepare and transfer produce from the garden to local supermarkets and retailers. With this funding, OGC will be more able to concentrate on establishing community ties to further supplement an already cozy axis with the Office of Sustainability Programs (OSP), an organization responsible for providing composting services to a growing sector of the Durham community, and various other University departments.
"I am confident that I could get anyone on campus excited about what we're doing here," Springer claims. " If there is one common ground that we all share, it's our bellies, and our health.
Implicit in such rhetoric, and that which becomes even more apparent with every casual chat had with individual members of the OGC, is the boundless satisfaction in knowing exactly what you're putting into your body, where it came from, and from whose hands it was brought to your plate.
Many people have been inspired by the invaluable hands-on experience nurtured by the OGC's "come-as-you-are" approach. One of these is UNH undergrad and veteran OGC member Rachel Huckins. Huckins became involved two springs ago when Springer's project was first being considered. She found the soon-to-be OGC a wealth of knowledge, both in terms of technique and botanical strategies.
"As a human being," Huckins explains, "it is important to know where my food is coming from, and to be involved with the first seed is very important."
For Huckins, as for most OGC members, what is done in and around the organic garden are by no means isolated phenomena. Indeed, by incorporating all aspects of the community-from the Town Hall to the town dump and everything in between-within an economically, agriculturally and environmentally sustainable practice, the incentive to extend what is still a microcosm of an as yet unrealized, world-wide organic revolution will become much more universal, and therefore much more appealing to those skeptical consumers still concerned with cost and convenience. Think globally, act locally.
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