Brown’s Cafe Herbal Garden

Brown's Cafe Herbal Garden

Project Leads: Hannah Haugenes and Samantha Lubow

Project Sponsor: Cal Dining

TGIF Grant: $13,717

Project Theme: Agriculture and Food Justice

Application Submission

Project Description: The Cal Dining Sustainability Team Garden Coordinators proposes a project to develop a new herbal garden with both raised bed and in-ground features at the site of the Brown’s California Cafe in the College of Natural Resource (CNR). Representatives from the Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S) department, Campus Grounds department, Campus Access Services, and Campus Sustainability Office have been and will continue to be consulted throughout the process. The team proposes that educational signage be created to transform the space into not only a productive edible green space but also an outdoor education space.

The TGIF Funds would cover the cost of student garden interns, planter boxes, and gardening materials. Implementation of this project would be a two phase process. The first phase would entail installing raised planter beds around the cafe’s outdoor seating area in accordance with an already development site plan and design standard. The second phase would expand the efforts by converting a strip of the lawn adjacent to the cafe into perennial herbal landscaping. One student garden interns would be tasked with initiating and tending to the garden over the summer 2018. Another student intern would be tasked with coordinating with on campus student organizations such as the Sustainable Campus Landscaping and Ecological Design Decal to plan work days over the course of the fall and spring 2018-2019 semesters.

Project Goals:

  1. Create an accessible and inviting education on-campus garden spaces and set the groundwork for the implementation of future on-campus garden initiatives.
  2. Develop a local source of herbs used in Brown’s Cafe, Cal Dining’s ‘extreme local’ dining facility, increasing both consumption of local produce and campus literacy around the benefits of local food production and distribution chain.
  3. Engage and empower diverse students and campus community members in the process of tending to plants and land.