Sustainable Gardening Library Welcomes UCSC Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

Touring UCSC CASFS farm with Trish Hildinger

The Sustainable Gardening Library’s newest collaborator is the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. More than 1,500 students have completed CASFS’s internationally-renowned immersion apprenticeship program, living and working on the Center’s 30 acre farm, attending 300 hours of classroom instruction, and putting in 700 hours of hands-on training in the greenhouses, gardens, orchards, and fields.

 In addition to the organically-certified farm, CASFS oversees the work of an on-campus CSA garden, and supports research, education, and community outreach. Their agroecosystem approach, based on ecological principles, is an ongoing quest to develop agricultural practices that can be maintained into the future without damaging surrounding natural landscapes.

Why We're Adding CASFS to The Sustainable Gardening Library
Over the years since its founding in 1971, the farm has influenced UCSC’s student food culture to the point that food harvested there is fully-integrated into the campus dining halls. It is believed to be the oldest organic farm on any University campus in the United States. “It’s really great work,” says noted NY Times food columnist Mark Bittman in this video of his visit to CASFS.

Look for the Sustainable Gardening Library’s CASFS content in the coming months.


Visit the Sustainable Gardening Library
Like us on Facebook 
Follow us on Twitter 

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading