Photos by Ralph Freso
Taking a tour of the campus garden with graduate student Ashlee Romine is like walking through a housewarming with the owner. To paraphrase:
Here’s broccoli, kale, salad greens, cut flowers, all the herbs … These volunteer tomatoes came up – I will show you over here …
I love it when the flowers start blooming; I am so excited for spring! I grew this luffa on a trellis and made soup out of it for gifts …
These snap peas are going crazy!
In 1 ½ years with Romine as garden manager, Grand Canyon University Outdoor Recreation’s half-acre lot adjacent to Agave Apartments has grown from compacted scrub ground to a tended oasis with a brick walkway, mulched ground, and irrigation and compost for 99 raised beds that students can rent for a semester.
And she did it on a shoestring, leading 10 student workers, enlisting volunteers, reusing materials and now partnering with a local nonprofit to improve the garden while providing a guide for a new way to garden in urban settings.
Urban Farming Education is working with GCU to use bags to grow food in unconventional spaces, such as rooftops, concrete lots, or in so-called food deserts with poor soil, and then publish a field guide from the experience to help others start community gardens from scratch.
It seems simple: You cut open a big hole in a bag of soil – similar to those you would see at any garden center, but this one is mixed with just the right amount of nutrient-rich properties by Urban Farm – and plant in the middle. They use an app-controlled watering system, soil-measuring sensors and built-in fertilizing to get it just right.
After planting in late October, the arugula, red cabbage, cauliflower, dill and other plants are making their appearance.
“You don’t need a fancy raised bed or an in-ground garden where you have to amend the soil. You just cut open the bag and things grow out of them,” Romine said.
Urban Farming needed space for the project, and the Campus Garden needed its help repairing the irrigation system and mulching the grounds between all the beds.
The bags save the expense of containers – which for a sizable community garden could be $20,000-$50,000, said Joe Roselle, chief operating officer of Urban Farming, whose mission is to facilitate growth of urban agriculture throughout the Valley. They also conserve water and control weeds.
“You could do it in your backyard, or people are doing it on their patios,” he said. “We want to make it accessible to everyone, big or small.”
He couldn’t have chosen a more apt demonstration of a ground-up community gardening than at GCU.
It started in the summer of 2020 and experienced fits and starts until Outdoor Recreation took it over more than two years ago.
“Our campus is a lot of concrete and buildings, so it’s cool to have a space for students to come out and do manual labor and move soil and learn to do these things by themselves,” said Cole Hanson, Outdoor Recreation manager. “It’s a good skill for people to have for the rest of their lives.”
They needed someone dedicated to the garden. Romine, a native of Colorado Springs, Colorado, loved to lead the department’s adventure outings, and as a recent graduate seeking the new nutrition master’s degree at GCU, she was intrigued by the garden’s graduate assistant job.
“I didn’t know anything about gardening, but I know a lot about food and nutrition,” Romine said. “So I researched gardening, and I found a passion for it. Now I want to have a garden my whole life.”
When Romine started as grad assistant at the campus garden in the summer of 2023, a tiller couldn’t even bust through the soil. Bermuda grass and weeds were about the only thing sure to survive. The few raised beds often struggled to produce. But she learned, and after an internship with Urban Farm Education, has become something of an expert.
“She just took it on. She figured out how to get partners like Urban Farming Education,” Hanson said. “It’s been really cool to see her figure it out herself.”
Romine became a grower who also knows deeply about the nutritional value of the food. It’s why one day she hopes to have her own business combining nutrition and gardening consultation.
But she quickly switches discussion to the stars of the plot, the plants: She had 30 watermelons this summer, she said, “and the squash went crazy. I feel like Arizona is really easy to grow things.”
“It’s fun because I get to create something. I decided I was going to make a pumpkin patch. So I made a pumpkin patch. There’s no one telling me I can’t.”
What about the planting parties, pickling classes, farmers markets, holiday gatherings for students on this ever-cozier campus garden, buzzing with birds and insects and pulsing life flanked by 15 fruit trees?
What about teaching students to grow their own food – 58 have plots this semester – and creating what she calls a “hang out space” that by academic year’s end will include an outdoor kitchen and gondola?
To Romine, it’s still all about the plants, the sheer wonder and joy she didn’t know she would get from growing.
“It’s cool to know the whole cycle – planting the food, growing the food, eating the food and even what to do with the waste and composting. It’s all a circle,” she said.
“I am reminded constantly of the curse – we have to work the ground and that’s really hard – but I feel like whatever pops up is really from God. He can do everything with the right circumstances.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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