Several new community plots in the UAB Gardens will provide vegetables, fruits, herbs and spices to help increase food security for the campus community and enable shoppers in UAB’s food pantry, Blazer Kitchen, to make more and varied healthy choices. The plots, located at 11th Avenue South and 17th Street, are tended by employees and students and funded through a grant from Sodexo’s Stop Hunger Foundation.
Winston Lancaster, Ph.D., associate professor of biology and a member of the UAB Sustainability Ambassadors program, has tended his own UAB Gardens plot for years. His interest in gardening dates to his childhood, when he helped his mother grow flowers, and he has tended his own personal gardens periodically for 30 years.
Winston Lancaster, Ph.D.When he noticed an unused plot in the UAB Gardens about two years ago, Blazer Kitchen’s efforts were the first thing that sprung to mind.
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“This is just an awesome idea to get something like this going — it helps students connect with the land. It’s important to be a part of the process so you can appreciate what you eat, try new things and have a hand in making it happen.” |
“It just occurred to me that we could use an unused space to grow things that could then be distributed in Blazer Kitchen,” Lancaster explained. “I’m not that great a gardener. I just had the idea and wanted to try.”
He learned from his network of colleagues in UAB Sustainability that there previously was a dedicated plot for Blazer Kitchen produce, and another person recommended starting new plots in an unused section of land near the original UAB Gardens parcel at 12th Avenue South at 17th Street. Together, UAB Sustainability, members of student organization Green Thumb and Lancaster began building and filling 10 raised beds. By September, they began planting and growing broccoli, collards, snow peas, radishes and more — all distributed through the Blazer Kitchen.
“I think of it like exercise,” Lancaster explained. “When you exercise, you don’t want to do something that you find unpleasant. You want to find something that you like to do. This is something I learned from my mom about the satisfaction of putting a seed into the ground and watching it come up. From there, we’re able to make a contribution to the community where we know there’s a need, and with the pandemic on top of that, it seems to have come at a great time of need.”
Susan Lyons, Ph.D.Blazer Kitchen coordinator Kaydian Jordan, says these garden plots are providing an invaluable service to Blazers who struggle with food insecurity.
“The idea that employees and students would spend time and energy, getting dirt under their nails to provide fresh produce for their fellow Blazers is so heartwarming,” Jordan said. “We learned in a 2018 survey that food insecurity affects more than one-third of UAB students, and it’s great to see Blazers banding together to make a difference.”
Susan Lyons, Ph.D., an administrator in the School of Medicine Comprehensive Neuroscience Center, has worked at UAB for two decades and is friends with Lancaster, which is how she became involved in tending Blazer Kitchen plots. Lyons says she has experience with gardening and has long thought Alabama should rely more on growing its own vegetation rather than importing it from other states.
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“You want to find something that you like to do. This is something I learned from my mom about the satisfaction of putting a seed into the ground and watching it come up. From there, we’re able to make a contribution to the community where we know there’s a need, and with the pandemic on top of that, it seems to have come at a great time of need.” |
“We have the greatest growing season and good land, and it’s amazing that there aren’t more people gardening and growing food for our people,” Lyons explained. “This is just an awesome idea to get something like this going — it helps students connect with the land. It’s important to be a part of the process so you can appreciate what you eat, try new things and have a hand in making it happen.”
Ryan Buckman, a graduate student studying for his master of public health, helped organize Green Thumb in 2019 and also tends the plots. Together, he and Lancaster run the garden’s daily operations, now more complicated by fewer volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work, however, is more important than the obstacles, Buckman said.
“I believe access to healthy food is a fundamental human right that often is left out of the policy-making process,” he explained. “It goes without mentioning that students in college already are at a disadvantage when it comes to eating enough fruits and vegetables because of the fiscal constraint and the workload of being a student. I’ve also learned that this applies to other members of the campus community as well, from staff to post-graduate trainees and even faculty.
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“My hope is that a community-based project enabling fruits and vegetables to be grown by other students and faculty down the street from where they are given away could help make progress in that capacity.” |
“I also, as a public health professional, understand the role that food can play in our health and well-being on both the macro-level and micro-level,” he said. “In addition to the inequities that are exhibited in access to fruits and vegetables, I believe that all people would be better served if they knew who produced their food, where it comes from and how it is produced. My hope is that a community-based project enabling fruits and vegetables to be grown by other students and faculty down the street from where they are given away could help make progress in that capacity.”
In addition to the broccoli, cabbage, collards, kale, radishes and spinach currently growing in the Blazer Kitchen plots, and fava beans, onions, garlic and carrots will be ready in early spring. More fruits and vegetables, including squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and sweet potatoes, among others, will be grown later in the spring semester. An herb garden also is being discussed. To volunteer to tend the plots, email sustainability@uab.edu.
Since its creation in March 2017, Blazer Kitchen’s two locations — in Medical Towers and the Hill Student Center — have provided more than 380,000 meals to 911 students, 782 employees, and patients in 10 UAB Medicine clinics.
