When Jonah Yaffe ’26 of Dallas got a serious concussion this spring, his activities were immediately limited. Luckily, he had a low-impact but very sweet new hobby that took up enormous amounts of time: boiling maple tree sap into syrup.

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Yaffe said. “I could just sit there. It’s a very passive activity.”

And Yaffe had a lot of sap that he needed to boil. This past winter semester, Yaffe and the �ֲ���ý Maple Syrup Club earned a �ֲ���ý Green Grant to bolster the club’s on-campus sugaring efforts. They produced seven caramel-colored gallons of maple syrup from �ֲ���ý trees and with �ֲ���ý people. 

Through the annual Green Grants program, the college offers grants of up to $2,000 to campus sustainability projects led by students, faculty, or staff. In addition to Yaffe’s project, four other projects earned Green Grants this year:

• An effort to revamp the college’s green bike fleet led by EcoReps — students who work to promote environmentally responsible behavior on campus — Liza Bell ’26 of Putney, Vt., and Greta Hendrickson ’28 of Duluth, Minn.
• A collaboration with the on-campus cafe Le Ronj to offer discounts for students who bring disposable cups, led by the �ֲ���ý Environmental Coalition
• An initiative to increase recycling education and materials around campus led by EcoReps Caroline Mayer ’26 of Wolfeboro, N.H., and Sarah Smith ’26 of Severna Park, Md.
• An initiative to install native trees around the �ֲ���ý Garden to prevent wind and noise pollution by Riley Baker ’26 of Northfield, Ill., and Yaffe

“What’s so unique about the Green Grants program is that it puts the stewardship of campus sustainability in the hands of the students themselves,” said Assistant Director of Sustainability Tom Twist. “They are empowered to be the project managers for their own sustainability ideas, and to see a project through from its original spark of an idea, through all the detailed minutiae, to its final completion. Having the students shepherd a project through this entire arc transforms not only the campus, but the student as well.”

The idea for the Maple Syrup Club originated from Yaffe’s work as a student groundskeeper and EcoRep. Yaffe, an environmental studies major, had spent many hours working in the �ֲ���ý Garden — a.k.a the PLOT — and began wondering if it would be possible to tap the garden’s dozens of maple trees. 

When he posed the question to Facility Services staff, whom he’d come to know well across his years working outside, they encouraged him to pursue the idea. Yaffe joined Jeremy Lavertu, a carpenter with Facility Services, for a University of Maine workshop on tapping maple trees to learn the basics of sugaring, then founded the club with Angus Carter ’25 during the 2024-25 academic year.

That first winter, the Maple Syrup Club collected 10 gallons of sap from 10 trees in the PLOT. But the club lacked the funds they needed to purchase the proper equipment for filtration and boiling, key steps of the sugaring process that turn sap, which is 98 percent water and 2 percent sugar, into syrup. Yaffe had to complete the boiling process in Vermont with a friend’s home evaporator, a wood stove that can filter and boil large quantities of sap.

Those 10 gallons of sap boiled down into two mason jars worth of syrup. The experience was fun, but Yaffe had his eye on something bigger for the following winter that would not only generate more syrup but also bring together students, faculty, and staff.

To achieve that goal, he’d need proper technology and machinery, hence his application for a Green Grant. He used the awarded funds to purchase an evaporator, taps for the trees, and buckets to collect sap. After extensive conversations with Facility Services and the City of Lewiston about safely installing the evaporator, the club installed the stove outside of Cutten Maintenance Center. 

Haskel McKee-Seegal ’29 of Honolulu, a friend of Yaffe’s from the Orange Whip Ultimate frisbee team, became Yaffe’s co-conspirator in this season’s sugaring efforts. The two of them, with the help of a dozen or so other dedicated club members, collected 180 gallons of sap from 30 maple trees behind Leahey Field, which they stored in metal drums outside of Cutten.

“The Green Grant really helped us get off the ground,” Yaffe said. “We couldn’t have done anything without it.”

Equally vital were community members. Mike Walsh, a project manager with Facility Services, helped students with logistical and scientific components. Having first learned how to tap trees as a Boy Scout growing up in Maine, Walsh now produces gallons of syrup each year on his 50-acre property in Poland, Maine. He donated 150 gallons of his own sap to the students, nearly doubling their supply. 

“I had extra this year,” Walsh said. “I could have boiled it myself, but they were having such a good time. I said, ‘You know what? I will just load it up in the truck and bring it in.’”

Wood for the �ֲ���ý evaporator came from Walsh and grounds and maintenance workers Ian Brownlie, Amy Ray, and Nate Calden. Projects like this help demonstrate to students the vital, sometimes unseen role that staff play on campus, Walsh said.

“We have a lot of our own talents, and a lot of us want to give back to the student base,” Walsh said. 

Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the Faculty Mike Rocque donated several gallons from trees tapped around his home in Litchfield, Maine. Sugaring was new to him, and he enjoyed learning alongside the students and staff.

“I really like that part of engaging in the �ֲ���ý community, where people aren’t in their silos, but we’re all together and learn about what people do across the different areas on the campus,” Rocque said.

After running those 300-plus gallons of pure tree sap through another piece of equipment called a reverse osmosis system, which served as a filter, the students were left with about 150 gallons of concentrated sap. Then, they boiled on the evaporator. And boiled, until all that sap was distilled into seven gallons of pure maple syrup.

“Haskel and I spent many a night in the very cold sitting by the wood stove, boiling sap,” Yaffe said.

Yaffe and McKee-Seegal, an earth and climate sciences major, put in the most hours beside the evaporator, but they weren’t alone. Other club members took shifts, and Facility Services staff often stopped by.

“They were all super, super interested, super excited to talk with us and learn about the process,” McKee-Seegal said.

In addition to bringing together the �ֲ���ý community, another one of the club’s goals was to help students engage with Maine’s nature and culture through hands-on learning. 

It worked.“You feel a different way after doing something with your hands all day rather than doing something on your computer,” Jaffe said

Each club member who spent time at the evaporator went home with syrup. Then, during the Short Term Earth Day celebration, Yaffe and McKee-Seegal gave away Commons ice cream cones drizzled with their very own �ֲ���ý maple syrup. The students also gave a couple of jars to Facility Services staff, who stored their stash in the Cutten breakroom for sweetening coffee. 

“That was one of my favorite parts, giving away the syrup and saying, ‘This came from �ֲ���ý trees,’” Yaffe said. 

After graduating in May, Yaffe headed to Hiram, Maine, for his summer job working at Ossipee Valley Music Festival. McKee-Seegal plans to spend the winter 2027 semester abroad. But the two say that Maple Syrup Club will keep sugaring next winter under the leadership of several other club members, continuing the club’s goal of bringing together the �ֲ���ý community while learning about Maine’s nature and culture. 

“I ultimately want to go into sustainable business, working on supply-chain logistics and making them greener,” says Tamsin Stringer ’22 of Bloomington, Ind.

�ֲ���ý’ Green Innovation Grant program, Stringer adds, has given her a real-world reminder of what it will take to succeed in that work.

A member of the EcoReps, �ֲ���ý’ student sustainability corps, Stringer has been involved with a multiyear effort to replace restroom paper towels at �ֲ���ý with electric hand dryers. In applying for Green Innovation Grants to support that campaign, the EcoReps have taken pains to quantify the downsides of paper towels — their cost, the amount of waste they generate, and the staff hours that go into refilling dispensers and emptying waste receptacles.

Working with those numbers “has really given me a sense of the work that you have to do, to get that evidence and to do that research, in order to change structures that are supposedly unchangeable,” Stringer says.

The Green Innovation Grants, aka GIGs, are relatively small sums awarded to �ֲ���ý students, staff, and faculty for projects that make �ֲ���ý more environmentally sustainable — often in surprising ways.

For its fourth year, the program funded seven projects, ranging from $150 for helping birds avoid window collisions to the total of $3,600 for two proposals for supplanting paper towels with electric dryers.

The GIG program was designed to encourage �ֲ���ý folks, especially students, to become active stakeholders in advancing sustainability at the college. “The opportunity to have some ownership of how the college runs, even in small ways, can give students the power to feel like they can address larger issues,” says Emma Wheeler ’20 of Bergen, Norway, who with Stringer proposed one of the hand dryer projects.

“At �ֲ���ý, just because it’s such a close-knit, smaller community, this kind of funding — while it may seem small compared to other schools — and these projects have a much larger impact campus-wide,” says Stringer. “We feel the impact of every single project.”

Tom Twist, �ֲ���ý’ sustainability manager, points out a few themes that this round’s successful projects, all of which were proposed by students, have in common. One is attempting to mitigate the campus waste stream. In particular, as they have in past years, students are showing a strong interest in finding ways to recycle problematic items.

One of the most eye-opening ideas came from Henri Emmet ’21 of New York City. He received a $240 grant to establish a means of recycling a notoriously hard-to-recycle waste material, plastic foam such as Styrofoam. Emmet’s solution: raising larvae of the beetle species Zophobas morio, which not only eat foam but are nourished by it and reduce it to harmless organic matter.

An environmental studies major and member of �ֲ���ý’ track and cross country teams, Carly Harris ’22 of Orinda, Calif., proposed a collection box for worn-out athletic shoes in Merrill Gym. Once filled, the box will go to a company that deals with tough-to-recycle products. Previous GIGs have paid companies such as TerraCycle, of Trenton, N.J., to recycle nitrile gloves and wrappers from snack foods such as chips and energy bars.

Shoes, Twist explains, tend to be what recycling experts call “monstrous hybrids” — they combine different types of material in a way that makes recycling them difficult and expensive. Harris’ program, he says, “is nice because it funds the dissection of your typical shoe so that it can be recycled.”

Harris finds that she goes through about four pairs of athletic shoes annually. And according to her GIG proposal, �ֲ���ý’ 850 or so student athletes each year use up at least 1,000 pairs of athletic shoes, which have historically ended up in the landfill.

This year’s grants also demonstrate that “students are really getting more involved in the infrastructure of campus,” says Twist. He adds, “That’s what we had hoped would happen” with the program. “It shows a sophistication on their part to start to look at the built environment and how to change it.”

For instance, four students proposed the installation of bathroom light controls in the three dorms of the Residential Village. Apparently designed to be lit 24/7 when the dorms were built, in the early 1990s, the bathrooms were never equipped with on-off switches.

Meanwhile, Mia Shifrin ’23 of Weld, Maine, and Amelia Keleher ’21 of Corrales, N.M., members of the EcoReps’ campus garden group, received some $1,500 for facilities at the college’s vegetable garden that will make the space more useful for informal and formal education. This will help realize an early goal for the garden, aka The Plot.

Taking on the campus wastestream and infrastructure too, the Stringer-Wheeler project is part of a greater EcoRep plan to convert a total of 38 towel dispensers in five buildings — the Page, Adams, Parker, and Rand residences, as well as Chase — to dryers.

Paper hand towels account for more than a third of the waste from residential buildings with paper towel dispensers, Stringer and Wheeler wrote in their proposal (which will pay for the installation of two already-purchased dryers in the restrooms that serve the Bobcat Den. The other project is for four dryers in Rand Hall.) And the towels can’t be composted and must be sent to the local landfill.

Moreover, the pair stated, for just the five buildings in the EcoRep study, the college spends upward of $21,000 annually on paper towel-related expenses.

The first-year cost of the conversion for the five buildings would be close to $78,000 — but the annual operating cost of the dryers would be $600. After five years, they predicted, �ֲ���ý would save about $105,000, and after 10 years, about $210,000.

In addition to the savings both in dollars and waste, the dryers make life easier for the custodians and for the crews who pick up trash from the buildings. The students “took everything into account, really — the cost of buying paper towels, cost of disposing of them, the labor involved in having to manage all the paper towels, etc.,” says Twist. “It was really nicely done.”

In fact, Twist points out, the EcoReps’ fact-finding in the case of towels vs. dryers has come to the attention of the college’s capital planners, “to see if we could do that on a wider scale, because it has such a favorable payback.” He adds, “It’s pretty staggering. And no one really knew before the students did some work on it.”

As the GIG program has progressed from year to year, “we’ve seen a lot of increasingly practical projects that are very well-documented and thought-through,” Twist says. “And that also shows an increasing sophistication beyond just, ‘Wouldn’t this idea be nice?’

“The students are doing a really good job in making a hard case for these things to happen.”

Green Innovation Grants awarded for 2019–20

Proposal (two combined): Replace paper towels with hand dryers in Chase and Rand halls
Submitters: Tamsin Stringer ’22, Bloomington, Ind.; Emma Wheeler ’20, Bergen, Norway; Dianna Georges ’22, Clifton, N.J.; Noah Pott ’22, Great Barrington, Mass.
Award: $3,600
Goal: Reduce cost of, waste produced by hand-drying at �ֲ���ý

Proposal: Place stickers on 280 College Street glass walls to increase their visibility to birds
Submitter: Adam Banks ’21, Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Award: $150
Goal: Reduce bird casualties from flying into glass

Proposal: Breed insect larvae (Zophobas morio) that consume and digest plastic foams such as Styrofoam
Submitter: Henri Emmet ’21, New York City
Award: $240
Goal: Reduce plastic waste produced by the college

Proposal: Place a collection box in the Merrill Gym lobby to collect discarded athletic footwear for recycling
Submitter: Carly Harris ’22, Orinda, Calif.
Award: $274
Goal: Reduce the amount of worn-out athletic footwear produced by students and sent to the landfill

Proposal: Furnish Ladd Library with “stapleless” staplers
Submitter: Hermione Zhou ’21, Shenzhen, China
Award: $300
Goal: Reduce one-use consumption of metal staples, make paper more recyclable

Proposal: Standardize waste collection facilities among �ֲ���ý dorms
Submitter: Olivia LaMarche ’20, Lynnfield, Mass.
Award: $767
Goal: Increase amount of waste accepted for recycling by reducing contamination

Proposal: Create facilities for informal and formal education in the �ֲ���ý Plot
Submitters: Mia Shifrin ’22, Weld, Maine; Amelia Keleher ’21, Corrales, N.M.
Award: $1,512
Goal: Enhance the �ֲ���ý Plot’s role as a gathering space, and improve organization and accessibility to the garden for �ֲ���ý and Lewiston communities

Proposal: Install bathroom lighting controls in the Residential Village
Submitters: Julia Panepinto ’20, Buffalo, N.Y.; Olivia McCulloch ’21, Sunderland, Mass.; Ruby Lightbourn ’21, Los Angeles; Jared Schell ’21, Media, Pa.
Award: $1,800
Goal: Conserve energy by turning off lights when bathrooms are empty

In an echo of last year’s Green Innovation Grant awards, this year’s GIGs continue to reflect the campus community’s interest in growing food and shrinking the �ֲ���ý waste stream.

Of the $10,000 in grants awarded by �ֲ���ý’ Committee on Environmental Responsibility, $4,000 will support infrastructure improvements to the Plot, the �ֲ���ý fruit and vegetable garden established last year with an initial GIG and additional support from Dining Services.

Another $2,700 will fund projects that, in various ways, will expand recycling and reduce the amount of refuse �ֲ���ý sends to the Lewiston landfill.

One waste-trimming project funded for 2019 is an extension of an older initiative that wasn’t GIG-funded. Launched by �ֲ���ý staff about a year ago, the project brings a social-engineering approach to the problem of minimizing throwaways: It replaces standard wastebaskets in certain campus buildings with much smaller receptacles.

“The hope is to create more awareness that much of what ends up in the waste stream is actually recyclable,” says Travis Gould, an assistant professor of physics and chair of the CER. Gould proposed the 2019 project, which will supplant wastebaskets with “mini-bins” that hook side-saddle onto, or even into, recycling receptacles.

The side-saddle trash receptacle attaches to a traditional blue recycling basket.

“Perhaps seeing a large recycling bin accompanied by a small waste bin will cause people to put extra thought into which bin the ‘trash’ they are about to throw away should actually go into.”

The $1,000 project could result in as many as 100 of the side-saddle bins replacing their full-size siblings on campus.

The concept was initiated and proven in a slightly different form last year by Lori Larsson, then a member of the Information and Library Services staff.

She introduced quart-sized “tiny trashcans” in Ladd Library and elsewhere, and their success led Sarah Bernard ’75 of Human Resources and other employees to do likewise throughout their offices.

A Green Innovation Grant will fund a permanent water supply for the college garden’s irrigation system (the drip lines shown at lower left and right are part of the extensive system). Shown are Josie Gillett ’19 of Seattle and Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Boston, who tended the garden in 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As for the Plot, Green Innovation Grants will pay for the construction of a shed and the installation of a permanent water feed from a nearby �ֲ���ý-owned house. The shed will afford secure storage of tools and supplies that, last year, were stockpiled on wooden pallets under tarps.

Replacing a long concatenation of hoses crossing field and forest from the �ֲ���ý house to the Plot, the underground pipe will provide a low-fuss, reliable supply of water to the garden’s irrigation system, which consists of drip lines that snake throughout the garden beds.

For sustainability manager Twist, the emphasis on recycling and the garden in the GIG proposals is telling. “It’s sort of a peoples’ movement thing,” he says. “Anyone can get involved in recycling. Anyone can help out with the garden.

“And I think it’s hopefully showing a larger, broader groundswell of interest in sustainability. Especially with recycling — anyone who cares, and wants to put their money where their mouth is, can just get into it and do a project with that.”

Green Innovation Grants awarded for 2018–19

Proposals (three combined): Create a system for sending hard-to-recycle products — such as disposable lab gloves, beauty products, snack wrappers, and CDs/DVDs — to TerraCycle, a New Jersey company that processes such difficult recyclables.
Submitter: Ross Ackerman ’19, Jake O’Hara ’21, and Camille Parrish, learning associate and lecturer in environmental studies
Award: $1,200
Goal: Increase the scope and quantity of recycling at �ֲ���ý.

Jake O’Hara ’21 is part of a team that received Green Innovation Grants two years in a row to deal with hard-to-recycle products, such as disposable lab gloves. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Proposal: Expand the Tiny Trash program.
Submitter: Travis Gould, assistant professor of physics and chair of the Committee on Environmental Responsibility
Award: $1,000
Goal: Use the visual cue of small trash receptacles paired with large recycling bins to divert refuse away from the waste stream and into recycling.

Proposal: Install water fountains and bottle filling stations in Carnegie Science Hall.
Submitter: Nicole Hastings, assistant in instruction in physics and astronomy
Award: $2,000
Goal: Reduce use of disposable water bottles and encourage healthy hydration (this will complete a GIG-funded project proposed last year).

Proposals (two combined): Build a tool shed and permanent water supply for the Plot, the college vegetable garden.
Submitters: Austin Shaver ’21; Tom Twist, �ֲ���ý sustainability manager
Award: $4,000
Goal: Improve efficiency of garden infrastructure.

After a highly successful first growing season, you would think it’s now time for the �ֲ���ý garden, and the gardeners, to take a rest.

But in the garden on a windy, chilly mid-October morning, two �ֲ���ý students and a staff member are preparing for a new round of crops instead.

New plantings in Maine in October? You bet. Determined gardeners can extend the growing season well past summer with the right crops and the right infrastructure.

Against a background of tomatoes discouraged by frost, Olivia Kranefuss ’22 of Madison, N.J., and Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Boston assemble a cold-frame cover at the Plot. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

And so on this morning eight trays of cold-hardy seedlings — carrots, leeks, arugula, spinach, beets, chard, kale — sit near the �ֲ���ý trio in a patch of sun.

In a patch of shade, the three are tackling the infrastructure: five big heavy wooden cold frames. Sustainability Manager Tom Twist is building covers for the frames from wood and heavy translucent fabric.

Meanwhile, aiming to settle the frames into the soil by a few inches, Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Boston and Olivia Kranefuss ’22 of Madison, N.J., are carving out frame-shaped trenches with long-handled spades. The soil in the garden, aka the Plot, is heavy and gummy with marine clay, and the digging is slow.

Gaillard is making a bit more headway than Kranefuss. But she’s had a lot more practice than her first-year colleague. Gaillard and Josie Gillett ’19 of Seattle spent the summer at �ֲ���ý as paid Plot interns — raising from that clay-heavy soil nearly a ton of produce that they delivered to Commons for campus consumption.

The pair, in short, got the Plot off to a resounding start.

“It was an excellent partnership,” says Christine Schwartz, an early champion of the project and �ֲ���ý’ assistant vice president for dining, conferences, and campus events. “It was the dedication on the part of the students that made it so successful.”

The Plot’s first summer was a win for all concerned. Gaillard and Gillet gained valuable experience growing vegetables to customer specifications. Commons got fresh, �ֲ���ý-grown produce to offer customers at the vegan station and salad bar. And diners were pleased to chow down on the tomatoes, cucumbers, kale, and other crops.

“The produce was phenomenal,” says Schwartz. (Some campus customers even got free vegetables to enjoy at home when the Plot supply outstripped Commons’ appetite in August.)

Leading the �ֲ���ý garden effort during the 2018-19 academic year, senior EcoReps Katharine Gaillard of Boston and Isa Moise of Mount Vernon, N.Y., look on during an Oct. 9 party at the Plot. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

If a recent light frost, failing daylight, and a summer of production left the Plot looking dilapidated by mid-October, in its heyday the college garden was a stunner — long happy rows of summer squash, cucumbers, and kale, and 180 tomato vines reaching for the sky on tall trellises. (Onions were the only crop that didn’t thrive.)

Isa Moise ’19 of Mount Vernon, N.Y., heard about the Plot all summer — she was doing research for the project while she worked a summer job (aquaponic farming, in fact) — but didn’t get to work in the �ֲ���ý garden until start of school in September.

“I was amazed at how big it was,” says Moise, who has a job as operations manager at the Brooklyn aquaponic operation Oko Farms waiting for her after graduation. “I had only heard the figures over the phone or over Facetime, but when I got there and could see the Plot — ‘Wow, this place is huge, and it’s producing so much.’

“Then, to see the greens and the tomatoes that we grew on people’s plates in Commons, that was just super cool.” Moise is co-leading the Plot with Gaillard this academic year (both are EcoReps, members of a student program undertaking campus sustainability projects).

Kranefuss and Gaillard dig trenches to set cold frames into at the Plot. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Aside from tending the new plantings in the cold frames, what remains to be done in the Plot after 2018’s productive summer is cleanup: removing dead plants and apparatus like the tomato trellises, and mulching the beds with dead leaves that Facility Services will supply. Those chores will be done during �ֲ���ý’ Nov. 4 EcoService Day.

As growers do, Moise and Gaillard are increasingly focusing on next year. One objective is to design a garden schedule, in light of this year’s experience, for their successors. Crop rotation, that tried-and-true means of keeping soil healthy with a minimum of fertilizer and other inputs, is part of the plan.

“We’re trying to lay out a framework to follow so that people know, ‘You’ll grow this this year and you’ll grow that next year, and this is why,’” Moise explains. “You have to replenish the soil.”

If Commons and its customers were pleased by the Black Cherry tomatoes and the Red Russian kale that poured out of the garden in July and August, the ultimate point of the Plot is teaching students. That entails all manner of practical skills (and not just wrangling clay soil), but a few deeper lessons have taken root in there, too.

Anna Maheu ’21 of New York City and Elliot Wilson ’21 of Lakeville, Conn., inspect one of the Macoun apple trees that they grafted at the Plot last spring. The pair were among students attending a party at the Plot on Oct. 9. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Even though a lot of meetings and planning happened before we did anything major,” says Gillett, “Katharine and I had to do a lot of thinking on our feet to get things done well and efficiently. It was really cool to balance big-picture planning with on-the-ground decision making.”

“Farming is all about learning from your mistakes and being humbled by the environment,” Moise adds. “You could lose a bunch of your tomato crops and you could get mad — or you could be like, ‘Okay, what are we going to do now to fix this problem?’”

Rolling with circumstances is key, Gaillard agrees. And that encompasses the pleasures as well as the problems, a perspective that is valuable not only in the pressurized world of academics, but in the workaday world as well.

Kranefuss attacks the Plot soil, which is heavy and gummy with marine clay. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“You have deadlines, and you have to do this by this time, and you have certain procedures that you have to do and that everyone does,” she says. “That’s just the way my mind is trained to go, I think.”

“But the garden work is very much not that way.” Some days during the summer, she’d find herself eyeing her watch as she hustled through the weeding and picking. “But then I’d always find myself going, ‘Katharine, you’re enjoying this. This doesn’t have to be rushed.’

“That balance is a nice one to have.” That’s a reason, she says, “why I’m excited to get more students involved, and just have it be more of a part of campus.”

Backed by Commons, the EcoReps, and sustainability manager Tom Twist, Moise and Gaillard are working a number of levers to enlarge the cadre of dedicated Plotters, which now stands at 10 or so.

Fresh tomatoes grown on site baked with fresh mozzarella made a popular treat at a Plot party on Oct. 9. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“That’s definitely the ongoing challenge,” Gaillard says. “If the dream is to be this space that students can go to and feel they’re a part of, and feel they have input in and connection to, how do we start that? We’ve tried a bunch of things.”

“We’re trying to enlist different clubs,” Gaillard adds, pointing to the Cold Front ultimate club and �ֲ���ý Builds as participants this year. “We’re trying to be like, ‘We have common ground in this area.’”

Regularly scheduled open garden hours make it easy to drop in and work for a couple of hours. The �ֲ���ý Garden Club builds enthusiasm for the Plot through publicity and presentations on garden-related topics. On Oct. 9, the EcoReps event committee hosted a well-attended Garden Party.

“That was awesome,” Gaillard says. And while they’re not complacent about attracting new recruits to the cause, she and Moise are nevertheless pleased by the excitement they’re seeing among fellow students.

“There are people that come to open hours each week, or every time we host something, they show up,” Gaillard says. “I hear people telling their friends about it.”

Josie Gillett ’19 of Seattle, Wash., and Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Boston during the Plot’s 2018 heyday. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Do you like squash blossoms?” Josie Gillett ’19 asks Owen Keene, �ֲ���ý’ executive chef.

It’s July 24, and Keene and Gillett are at a counter under a window in Commons. Keene scrutinizes the big yellow blossoms in a black plastic bin. “There are no bees?” he jokes.

Nope, no bees nor any other critters. Just a few minutes prior, in fact, Gillett and classmate Katharine Gaillard had inspected the blossoms in the field where they were grown, a block away from campus. That was part of a routine Gillett and Gaillard, interns for �ֲ���ý’ new garden, have developed as they fine-tune deliveries of the vegetables they’ve been tending since spring.

It’s early in the summer harvest season and today’s delivery is just the third the interns have made to Commons, their sole customer. In addition to a few summer squash and many blossoms (delicious when stuffed, battered, and fried), the delivery includes nearly 13 pounds of kale and four pounds, 12 ounces of tomatoes across four varieties.

Dining Services and the �ֲ���ý EcoReps established the fifth-acre garden, formally called the Plot, this year as an educational program. Garden interns like Gillett and Gaillard get hands-on experience with commercial and sustainable food production practices — and the campus gets a working farm, albeit a tiny one, that one day will also serve as classroom and lab.

At top and above right, Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Boston tends the Plot, �ֲ���ý’ new garden. At left, Josie Gillett ’19 of Seattle weeds cucumbers. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The Plot has come a long way since last spring, when EcoReps and volunteers carved it out of an acre and a half of unused, overgrown college land. This summer’s cash crops occupy two big beds in the sunniest portion, and the visual centerpiece is the tomato patch, whose 180 or so plants are trained to climb strings to tall overhead supports.

The other bed supports some 45 squash plants, 60 cucumber, 60 onion, and 50 Red Russian kale. Both beds are equipped for drip irrigation, and a mesh fence keeps hungry animals away from the tomatoes. Young berry bushes and apple trees line an edge of the clearing. A screen of wild trees, thick here and thin there, was left to provide some concealment.

Gaillard, a politics major from Boston, and Gillett, an environmental studies major from Seattle, brought their first harvest over to the dining hall on July 19. That was a couple of pounds of tomatoes. The second delivery was almost four pounds of tomatoes, and the third was the first to include other crops.

Cornucopia, here we come.

Clockwise from top left: tomatoes on the vine; ripe red tomatoes and Red Russian kale; tomatoes and summer squash; weighing squash blossoms in Commons. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Farmers’ woes are numerous, but the Plot has had little trouble so far: just a row of non-thriving onions, blossom-end rot on several paste-tomato plants (which they have since outgrown), and a few chewed-up tomatoes, probably by squirrels.

The interns spend about 20 hours a week tending the Plot. “Katharine runs a very tight ship in terms of weeds, so we never have to weed for that long,” says Gillett. “That’s like maybe 40 minutes a day. And if we need to trellis the tomatoes we’ll do that. And then recently we have been working on projects.”

The projects are bent toward making the entire 1.6 acre site more farmer-friendly. For instance, Gaillard recently spent a day hacking out a new, easier-access path into the Plot. (Philip Dostie, assistant in instruction in geology and a frequent Plot volunteer, wielded power tools in aid of that project.)

Both women have removed brush and tree debris from a shady portion of the site, with an eye to expanding the sunlit area in the long term (and maybe starting a mushroom bed in the meantime).

Gaillard’s and Gillett’s hours off the Plot tend to be likewise agricultural. Gillett is doing senior thesis research at the nonprofit, community-focused Whiting Farm, in Auburn. She’s studying ways that soil is improved by so-called companion planting, where different types of plants benefit from being grown right next to each other.

The best-known companion planting method may be the old Native American practice called “three sisters,” where beans, corn, and squash are planted together. And that’s what Gillett is researching, with a focus on beans’ ability to fix nitrogen, a plant nutrient, in the soil.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence, but not a lot of scientific data,” she says. Her many sisters haven’t grown quite enough yet for testing, she notes — “right now, I’ll weed here and then I go weed there.”

Living off campus, both students are getting their own vegetables from community-supported agriculture shares. Gaillard is earning hers in the field, at Willow Pond Farm, in Sabattus. (An adviser to the Plot, Jill Agnew and husband Charlie Agnew of Willow Pond were the first Maine growers to create a CSA shareholder program for direct-marketing to customers, in 1989.)

Gaillard’s roommates are fellow students whom “I didn’t know super-well until this summer,” she says. “So it’s been fun just getting to know them. And cooking a lot with our fresh produce. There’s nothing like it.”

Presenting the harvest in Commons. Above left, Executive Chef Owen Keene (foreground) and operations director Ken Smith discuss a bin of kale and squash with Gillett. Above right, Gillett maneuvers 13 pounds of kale toward a sink for rinsing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College) .

Tending the same ground day after day can sharpen one’s appetite for new prospects. If their daily routine at the Plot is harvesting, weeding, and bringing squash blossoms, etc., to the Dining Services kitchen crew, both Gaillard and Gillett are acutely aware of growing the �ֲ���ý garden in other ways as well, physically and conceptually.

“We’ve gotten everything in the ground, we’ve started harvesting, and it’s sort of maintenance work with the actual plants at this point,” Gaillard says. So now what?

Maybe expand the sunny area and put in cold frames in time for fall and cool crops like lettuce or spinach. And then there’s always the greater mission of the garden, its educational potential.

“How are we going to involve all the students when they come back? And what is that going to look like?” Gaillard wonders. “So just when one thing is taken care of, a whole other thing comes up.

“I’m really hoping that it continues. And having this be the start of it all is probably the most exciting part — it’s only going to grow and get more exciting as things go on.”

“Our plants are definitely ready,” says Josie Gillett ’19, an environmental studies major from Seattle.

The plants, seedlings really, are Red Russian kale and five varieties of tomato. Numbering in the dozens, they are thriving in the �ֲ���ý greenhouse atop Carnegie Science Hall. Gillett and Katharine Gaillard ’19 of Exeter, N.H., are about to move the tomatoes to larger pots.

Even confined to their starter cells, all the plants are big, green, and healthy. As Gillett says, they are clearly poised for their own leafy Commencement: life outside the greenhouse in the new �ֲ���ý Garden, where they’ll help supply Commons’ vegan station.

A quarter-acre plot near campus, the �ֲ���ý garden is not the first kitchen garden the college has ever had. But it is the first designed to immerse students like Gillett and Gaillard, who will spend the summer tending the garden, in the realities of sustainable, commercial food production.

Juniors and summer garden interns Katharine Gaillard of Exeter, N.H., and Josie Gillett of Seattle talk about their gardening project in the �ֲ���ý greenhouse. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“It’s a learning opportunity,” says Christine Schwartz, assistant vice president for Dining, Conferences, and Campus Events. Her budget is funding the internships for Gillett and Gaillard, and Dining Services will pay market rates for �ֲ���ý Garden produce.

“It’s just been immeasurable how useful and supportive Dining Services has been,” says Nell Houde ’18, an environmental studies major from Meriden, N.H. Houde has been working all academic year to establish the garden, helping to organize a student Garden Club and landing a college Green Innovation Grant that funded nearly $2,000 worth of tools and supplies.

Reaping the earth’s bounty is personally and profoundly gratifying, but being accountable to others for the food you grow brings the whole business down to earth (sorry) in important ways. Routinely delivering clean, good-looking produce, in the stipulated quantities at the stipulated time, are a few of the things that separate the successful commercial grower from the gratified home gardener.

Running a campus garden that’s sustainable both environmentally and operationally, says Schwartz, “is entirely consistent with our philosophy of purchasing locally, educating the community, and reducing our carbon footprint.”

And it’s a great way for �ֲ���ý to express its green ethos, Houde adds — “to have that be a selling point of the college, to actually attract potential students. ‘If you care about food, you can engage with it on campus.’”

Gaillard and Gillett of Seattle pot up bare-root berry bushes in the �ֲ���ý greenhouse. Blueberries and raspberries in the �ֲ���ý Garden will likely start bearing fruit next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At Dining Services’ request, Gillett and Gaillard are emphasizing tomatoes, summer squash, and cucumbers, but they’re also raising potatoes, onions, and the kale. And planting blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries that ought to bear fruit next year. (They purchased the berry bushes, onion sets, and seed potatoes from the Maine co-op Fedco, at an annual “tree sale” that’s a must-do among many Maine growers.)

Though the seedlings in the greenhouse are hankering to sink their toes into the dirt, their quarter-acre future home isn’t quite ready for them. It’s a good site — southward sloping, smoothly contoured, and, according to the , adequately endowed with nutrients and free of lead and other heavy metals that would taint produce.

But there are still trees and grass to remove and beds to delineate and till. Facility Services and Phil Dostie, a handy �ֲ���ý Garden volunteer and an assistant in instruction in the geology department, are helping with the bigger trees.

Nell Houde ’18 of Meriden, N.H., wrestles with a sapling’s removed root ball at the site of the new �ֲ���ý Garden on May 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Meanwhile, the awesome pro-environment force known as the �ֲ���ý EcoReps added the garden to their project list on EcoService Day, May 6. Some 20 volunteers spent three hours uprooting saplings and carting in heavy bags of compost and other soil amendments — not to mention the little matter of making a trail to the garden, which is surrounded by trees and houses and has no direct road access.

EcoReps all, Gillett, Gaillard, and Houde were joined by more than a dozen other students; by Tom Twist, an energetic advocate for the �ֲ���ý Garden who, as �ֲ���ý’ sustainability manager, supervises the EcoReps; and by Francis Eanes, a visiting assistant professor in environmental studies and an authority on food systems.

During the session, the secluded garden site “went from looking like an empty space to a space that’s going to be a garden. It was really exciting,” says Gaillard, a politics major. “Even like 20 minutes in, we had a good portion of the plot cleared of saplings. It was like, ‘Wow, look what we just did.’”

Tom Twist, the college’s sustainability manager, rests his pickaxe on a shoulder as he reviews the work at the �ֲ���ý Garden on May 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The gardeners expect to have plants in the ground by Memorial Day. And by mid- or late July, if you’re dining in Commons, watch the vegan station for the fruits of their labors. Similar to what Dining Services did last summer with vegetables from local Somali Bantu growers, explanatory signage will announce the �ֲ���ý Garden goodies, says Dining Services Director Cheryl Lacey.

Schwartz has wanted a student-run vegetable garden on campus for years. In 2016, she and college landscape architect Bill Bergevin (who recently retired), approached sustainability manager Twist about establishing the �ֲ���ý Garden.

A previous vegetable garden, over on College Street, failed to attract enough student interest to succeed. This time, Schwartz and Bergevin wanted to ensure student buy-in for the garden, and they saw EcoReps as a means to that end.

Twist was all for it, especially the principle that the student gardeners be accountable partners in Dining Services’ supply chain. “We want it to educate students on how to do a productive garden,” says Twist, “not a pie-in-the-sky type of thing.

“So the fact that Dining is so enthused about this is a big deal.”

Aidan Denahy ’21 of Irvington, N.Y., and Gillett haul a cartload of compost uphill as they help prepare the �ֲ���ý Garden site during an EcoService Day work session on May 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It’s true that in terms of food produced, the return on Dining Services’ investment of dollars and staff time in the �ֲ���ý Garden will be minimal. Schwartz points out that where the previous �ֲ���ý garden could produce 12 pounds of bell peppers in a growing season, Dining Services uses 43,000 pounds of peppers in a typical year.

But, after all, education is the garden’s most valuable product, not pecks of peppers, especially at a college nationally recognized for anticipating its students’ need for meaningful work after graduation. And if cultivating real-world agricultural skills is one objective of the garden, there are others, as Eanes points out.

The garden could provide multidisciplinary learning opportunities “around soil, production practices, marketing, design, ecology, etc.,” he says. It could even serve as “a tool for initiating broader conversations at, and beyond, the college about the role of institutions in supporting a viable regional food system.”

Gaillard, Gillett, and Houde are reveling in these loftier possibilities for the �ֲ���ý Garden, especially its potential for raising student awareness of sustainable food sourcing. “Having a high interest in sustainable food and a passion for how that can bring people together, this is really exciting for us,” says Gaillard.

But in the meantime, these experienced gardeners are laying out beds, spreading Coast of Maine compost, wondering about succession plantings and what to grow come autumn — and waiting to see what the �ֲ���ý Garden’s first growing season will provide.

“It’s fun,” says Houde, “because gardening is the epitome of forcing you to trust the process and give up a little bit of control.

“Or a lot of control.”

The �ֲ���ý Garden site in early May. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)