| Garden School at UC Santa Cruz |
| UC Santa Cruz prepares students to go out into the world and make it green — in a myriad of ways. |
From "The Dirt On..."
episode DTDO-113 |
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It's back to school for the students at the University of California Santa Cruz, but not all of them will be hitting the books and the library. Some are destined to be garden school grads. The apprenticeship program at the University's farm prepares students for careers as farmers, community gardeners, nursery owners or even members of the Peace Corps. In this program, they truly live the life of a farmer on top of that of a student, living on campus in one big community.
The day starts at 6:30 am with breakfast, and then it's out to the work the fields until sundown. There's classroom time and studying that goes on in between and after hours too, so this six-month program is truly intense. The students learn about all aspects of gardening from irrigation to pests to planting and harvesting techniques. Upon graduation, they're ready to jump into any number of gardening careers.Christof Bernau, the Garden Manager and Instructor here, has used this hands-on approach to teaching for many successful years. The methods taught here are for organic gardening so it's a lot of hard work but it sure pays off when the harvest shows up in the cafeteria. The students definitely aren't afraid of a little hard work if it means they'll see results and apprentice Matthew McCue saw big results after working the soil. "The most important thing I've learned is the double digging concept, which is a method of cultivation where you dig really deep into the soil with compost." For the entire six months, the students literally get to see their work come to life — and once in a while they see their mistakes come to life too. It's all one big learning process and with the added bonus of open-book, open-garden exams, it certainly beats traditional textbook guided classes for building a lifelong base of garden knowledge.
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