WHAT: Harvest for the Yolo Food Bank
DATE: Friday, January 29, 2016
TIME: 9:30- 11:30 a.m.
WHERE: Plant Sciences Field (Meet at Bowley Plant Science Teaching Facility)
RSVP: Submit your name and email address

Pull on your boots, get out your gloves, and join students from the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden’s Learning by Leading Program this Friday from 9:30 – 11:30 a.m. to harvest produce from a student-planted, educational-use field just west of the Student Farm. (RSVP here.)

Used as a lab for undergraduates enrolled in Professor Muhammad Marrush’s Plant Sciences 5 course – Plants for Garden, Orchard and Landscape – this field provides students with hands-on experience cultivating plants for food as well as establishing and maintaining a vegetable garden.

“While in this class, my students’ enjoyment in planting and harvesting intensifies,” explains Marrush. “They come from all kinds of backgrounds, and grow up in cities where they don’t necessarily get the opportunity to make a genuine connection to food and where it comes from. My hope is that this course and events like this will continue after I retire.”

In the past students could harvest the produce for personal use, but there would end up being more than they needed. Now, thanks to a few conscientious students willing to go the extra mile, navigate, and comply with multiple safety and liability issues, they are now able to glean the edibles and donate them to a local food bank.

Carli Hambley, intern for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden’s Learning by Leading Program, the group facilitating the process and organizing the event, is hoping for a large turnout.

“We want volunteers to know that they are participating in a new program, but one that has been in the works for a while,” says Hambley.

“The process to start campus-wide produce recovery in teaching fields began with Environmental Science and Management major Hanna Morris,” explains Hambley. “She got the bulk of this process started. I picked up her baton and am lucky and proud to be here to finish the requirements and see it happen. The future of this program will reside with our campus’s Fresh Focus Program.”

Students in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden’s Learning by Leading Program take on a variety of challenges with staff mentor support.

“This particular project had multiple obstacles to overcome, but our students’ diligence and focus on sustainability paid off,” Kathleen Socolofsky, assistant vice chancellor and director of the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden said.

“So many individuals and departments were instrumental in helping us and our students make this happen – the Chancellor, Environmental Health and Safety, the Office of Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability, Risk Management, Contracts, the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, Plant Sciences, the Student Farm, Fresh Focus, but most of all, our students!”

Join them on Friday at what will be the first of many similar events across campus!