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Down at the bottom of a hill near the business center on Stony Brook Southampton’s 82-acre campus, a dozen students spent this spring and summer tilling a 1,600-square-foot plot of land and watering vegetables that will one day will play a major role in the menu of the campus dining hall.
The Garden Club, which tends the vegetable garden, is led by Dr. Jim Hoffmann, an ecology professor at the university. It’s one of the most homegrown aspects of the college, which Stony Brook University has begun to rebuild based on the concept of sustainability. The school introduced three new ecology-related majors this fall, the campus’s second year, and, according to Interim Dean Martin Schoonen, is expected to announce plans for a new green dorm.
Stony Brook is also completing the new library, which will have a geothermal heating system and a rooftop rainwater collector.
What excites the people on campus the most, though, is the notion of actually growing food that can be used for their meals. Two weeks ago, on September 23, under the guiding hands of chefs from local restaurants, the dining hall’s staff held a harvest dinner of butternut squash soup, blue potatoes, vegetarian chili, salad and sea scallops. Nearly all of the vegetables were grown in the campus garden. All the food that is not eaten in the cafeteria is also composted on campus, and there are no deep fryers used in the kitchen.
When Dr. Hoffmann first met with students in the spring, they had a list of more than 50 vegetables that they wanted to grow, some of which were arcane and unusual, but all of which received serious consideration.
“We grew bok choy, sweet potatoes, blue potatoes, pickles, arugula, cilantro, eggplant, cantaloupe,” said Dr. Hoffmann.
Autumn Droste, a student who gardened as a kid with her mom, had become a regular contributor to the work required to keep the garden going, which became particularly overwhelming when so few students stayed on campus in the summer.
“I was surprised at how demanding it is,” she said. “It takes a lot of patience and care.”
“We’re going to expand it for sure,” said Dr. Hoffmannn, who added that some schools have small farms that enable students to get a feel for what it takes to grow larger quantities of crops, and he would like to emulate that type of program at Stony Brook Southampton.
The campus previously had a rusting glass greenhouse near its technology center when the college was owned by Long Island University, but Stony Brook tore it down, said Mr. Hoffmann, because it wasn’t structurally sound.
The school’s physical plant staff built a new greenhouse near the garden last winter out of wood and plastic scavenged from buildings that had been renovated after the state bought the campus in 2006. Water that hits the roof of the greenhouse is collected in rain barrels and the building is heated with wood chips in the winter.
“The Garden Club is at the cutting edge right now,” said Dr. Schoonen, who added that he hopes to increase the size of the garden and use it for classes and on-campus internships. He also said that, since 40 students are already expected to be on campus next summer, there will be more people to take care of a larger garden next year.
“We use it as a springboard to start talking about food in America,” he said of the interaction between the curriculum and the garden. “It loops nicely back to the classes. In the environmental issues class that I co-teach, we talk for three weeks about the food industry, pesticides, aquaculture. When we go to the supermarket, we don’t see the water, soil or pesticides.”
On the late September evening that the Harvest Dinner was held, there was something else that was different about the campus, which has been little more than a ghost town since Long Island University closed its doors in 2005. There was actually a sense of student life, as bearded students on skateboards and serious students in business suits gathered at the entrances to the buildings, discussing science, the environment and ecology.
There are 350 full-time students, up from 200 last year, and 150 of them live on campus. Unlike last year, when many of the students on campus had been wait-listed at Stony Brook’s main campus and were waiting for admission there, this year, most of the new students applied directly to Stony Brook Southampton, looking for an education in sustainability. The college plans to enroll 2,000 students by its fifth year.
“We have more critical mass. In the two classes I co-teach, we have upward of 20 students,” said Dr. Schoonen, who said that last year, such classes ran with as few as half a dozen students. “With 20, that’s much more entertaining.”
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