LBCC Gardening Club Student Leaders on Growing Food and Community

The new LBCC Student Gardening Club’s purpose is to “encourage the love, knowledge, and practice of gardening among LBCC students.” Although the club just formed at the beginning of the Spring 2022 quarter, it already has a dedicated core of students who are working to create gardening space for students by repairing and restoring parts of the defunct Student Organic Farm and Veterans Garden.

Three of the Gardening Club student leaders, George Krohn, Tiffany (Tiff) Griffiths, and Jonathan Orlando talked about their reasons for joining the club, their impressions of the club so far, and their vision for the club’s future.

Hi, George, Tiff, and Jonathan! Would you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

George Krohn

George: I guess it’s important to say that I’m a single dude. I’ve been living in Oregon for three years. I was born in Wyoming and I spent the first 20 years of my life there going to get educated at my high school and stuff and after I graduated I started to move around the country… I was originally doing landscaping work for about two years before the pandemic hit. The pandemic gave me a lot of time for self-reflection and self-improvement. That’s when I decided to come here and go to school to pursue my passion of cooking professionally.

Now I’m just about to finish up my first year as a culinary student. And I am trying real hard now that the Covid restrictions have been lifted to come out and do things and see things that I hadn’t before. Which is part of the reason why I joined the gardening club.

Tiff: Originally from Southern Utah. Desert. One hundred twenty-degree summers. Dry heat. Nasty. I grew up there my whole life until I was 18… I just knew that I wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest since seventh grade.

I finally found LB because I wanted to study horticulture…So I ended up here and I love it. I was here for the horticulture program and they cut it. Now I’m here until I can get over into OSU and finish my botany degree there.

Jonathan: I’m in the biological sciences at LBCC and I’ll be at OSU for botany. I started out landscaping when I was 19 and have either had an outdoor seasonal job or been landscaping my whole life. I enjoy the outdoors. I enjoy plants. I have a really large fascination with mushrooms and fungi and botany. Specifically, the plant pathology portion of botany because it involves the most mycology (the study of fungi).

Tiff, you were part of the Horticulture Program for a time when the LBCC Student Organic farm was still in use before the horticulture program was suspended in 2019. What do you remember about that time?

Tiffany Griffiths

I remember it was my very first term here at LB. I took the Soils class. I was brand new to the area. And Stefan (Seiter, former head of the Horticulture Program) brought us out to the farm to do something for one of our very first labs. He gave us a tour of the farm and he showed us each of the apple trees and the blackberries and gooseberries. He said, “If you guys are ever hungry and you’re here at LB working hard, just come out to the farm. Just take a snack. Do some studying out here. I don’t care!”

 So for that whole term, I had an hour break and I would come out to the farm and I would pick an apple. And there used to be a little bench by the rain garden and I used to sit there and do my homework all the time and eat an apple or a bunch of blackberries. Just come out here and snack. It was awesome! I loved that!

And then it went all overgrown and you couldn’t really do that anymore.

What made you all interested in joining the Gardening Club?

Jonathan: I don’t have a large space to garden at my house, so I figured it was a good opportunity to grow a couple plants that I won’t fit at my house. I also listen to a lot of podcasts. One of the podcasts heavily features what’s called mutual aid. Mutual aid is different from donations in that you bring people with different skill sets together and they help out the community and each other. It’s all just providing what you know and your knowledge and your skill set to the community around you. You get benefits out of it as well as benefiting the community.

I was also really excited to get in from the start. Since [the club] was just getting started that meant that my voice was likely going to be heard. I have landscaping skills to apply and some gardening skills, maybe not as much as everybody else, but some to apply. I just figured it was a good opportunity to apply some of those mutual aid ideas that I had learned about and also grow the plants that I’m not able to at my house.

George: I really and truly enjoy doing a fair amount of work with my hands. Even doing weed pulling is one of the best ways that I can imagine, for myself, to spend my time right now.

I’m just about to turn 30. So in my life I’ve gotten over and done with all the sittin’ and playin’ video games phase of my life and wanting to be inside all of the time. I like working and keeping myself physically strong through all the bending and lifting. And there’s a certain amount of instant gratification with gardening. We didn’t plant a lot of these plants but a month ago and we can already see them coming up. And that’s a nice feeling.

Searching for a sense of community is a big one too. Working on the fields and working on the land has always been a community thing to do with other people, which is something that I was sorely missing out on.

Tiff: Plants! Growing a garden is always fun. I just moved … and my new place has a garden! I’ve never officially grown my own garden. I’ve always had help, like my dad or my aunt. So taking on the task of growing your own garden can feel a little overwhelming.

So when I saw the garden club I was like, “Hell yeah! Why not? There’s a bunch of other like-minded people who I can learn from and who can take whatever I’m doing at the garden club and take it to my own garden and it should work out!
 

What are your impressions of the Gardening Club so far?

Tiff: I’m so excited about the club. I would come over and walk my dog all the time at the farm. For the past two years it was severely under-managed and overgrown, but I was here when it was in the thicks. I always had the dream of revamping the farm but it seemed like an impossible task. So when I saw that Melinda (Williams, the Gardening Club representative) was doing it, I was so excited!

Just to see everybody caring about weeding and doing the hard stupid stuff. It’s been so exciting to see people come out and just care about getting it to a usable point, not even necessarily knowing that they’re going to get fruits and vegetables out of it. They’re doing it just to clean it up. So that’s been super exciting…

Like Jonathan [Orlando] just out there taking out the sticky weeds and poison hemlock on his own. His attitude is, “Oh it’s fine so that no one else has to deal with it during our work party.” I’m like, “Thank you! Oh my gosh! That’s awesome."

Jonathan: I really enjoy it! I like that everyone who’s there seems to be inspired. That is exciting to me. I don’t feel like anyone’s there just to be there. We’re all there to hang out and garden and learn from each other.

George: I think this is great. I think that gardening as a skill is one of those things that should have a resurgence in popular culture. I think people should know how to grow their own food and what to grow and when.

What do you envision for the future of the club?

Jonathan Orlando

Jonathan: I like the idea of coordinating with the culinary department. I think that’s an awesome idea for a community college to grow the food that’s going into their culinary department. But it’s not [the culinary school’s] financial responsibility or time responsibility. Somebody who is interested in growing the food [in the Gardening Club] is doing that. I’m really interested in doing that.

Apart from that, whatever ideas that people have, even giving back to communities or food shares or garden groups exchanging plants or plant sales. Any of that. I’m happy to get that out of the garden. That would be fantastic just to make the club something that’s enjoyable and make people want to come out.

But I think it’s mainly important to just get newer people in. Since it is a community college, people aren’t going to be going here forever. Everybody moves on at some point. So it’s ensuring that our hard work doesn’t turn back into what it was when we got there and [the farm and gardening facilities] are not in a state of disrepair and overgrown.

Tiff: I’m planning on sticking around here and making sure that nothing happens to this place…I really just don’t want [the farm and gardening facilities] to go to waste again. We have so much beautiful land. You can put your hand in, down to your elbow, in such good soil…

It’s not that [the garden] is going to get bigger and bigger until it’s crazy, although, of course, we’d all love to get to that point. But I want to make sure [the club] is sustainable. And it would be fun to have a little peaceful place for the students again to welcome them out here. 

As long as we don’t invite too many people and they don’t eat all of our fruit.

George: It’s that cheesy but true adage that “Wise men plant trees knowing that they’ll never sit in their shade.” I can see how beautiful this lot is. I think it’s an acre, acre and a half that we have here? Underneath all the tall grass, blackberries, and birds that come in here I can see where the rows of crops would go. I can only imagine four or five years from now, kids coming in and getting to reap the benefits of that, and that makes me super happy to think that might be the case.

So, what I found in the Gardening Club is a lot of hope looking into the future. Which is something we all need.

One of the goals of the Gardening Club is to “build community between student gardeners.” How do you feel about this?

George and Jonathan prepare to wage war on weeds.

Tiff: That’s probably the best part! I’ve never had friends who are interested in the same things as me. Like when we were cleaning up the hoop houses and Jonathan is like, “Oh look at this millipede. Look at this praying mantis sack!” And I get so excited because all of my other friends are like, “Ugh, bugs!” Instead of “Tiff, come look at this!” It’s so awesome to have people who care about the same things and want to share those experiences with you.”

Jonathan: I think that’s the best thing, to share the interest and passion that I have for plants and fungi and the things that I see growing out in the garden with the people coming in.

It’s clear that the Gardening Club community has also been very busy! Even though the club has only been in existence for one quarter, you have already done a great deal to reclaim parts of the student organic farm and the Veteran’s Garden from weeds and disrepair.

George: That’s the purpose of community. We don’t bring all the same things to the table. We bring a variety of skills and levels of skills to the table and that way we fill in the blanks for each other.

And as a community of people gardening, we become capable of getting a lot of good work done that way. We are capable of supporting each other’s work and it brings the median amount of work that we do up to a higher level.

That’s why community is so important.

That’s why people always do better in community than they do on their own.

 

LBCC Student Gardening Club At-a-Glance

Who: Open to all LBCC students

What: The goals of the club are to provide a place for LBCC students to practice gardening, facilitate instruction in gardening techniques to new gardeners, and build community between student gardeners.

Where: The LBCC Student Organic Farm and the Veteran’s Garden located in the northwest corner of the Albany campus by the Wellness Trail

When: The club formed at the beginning of Spring 2022 and will be active throughout the summer and fall growing seasons.

For more information contact: Gardening Club Representative Melinda Williams, melinda.groshong.9531@mail.linnbenton.edu

A Sublime Climb Down a Waterfall of Lime(stone) - Thailand's Bua Tong Waterfall

By the spring of 2011, my family and I had been living in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city, for about six months. I was there to set up field research for my dissertation. My husband worked remotely, attending meetings in the middle of the night to match schedules with his U.S. colleagues. Our kids, then 9 and 4, were going to international schools during the day and their evenings were filled with homework, extracurriculars, and play.

Since we knew we were only staying in Thailand for a year, our initial plan was to take advantage of our time there to explore at least one new place every weekend. This was a good idea in theory, but it was a little trickier to put into practice when every weekend followed an exhausting week of balancing family and work.

Nam Phu Chet Si (Seven Colors Spring)

So it took a little convincing for us to take up an invitation to go with friends to Bua Tong (Golden Lotus) Waterfall. We had already been to several waterfalls in the hill country around Chiang Mai and, while they were beautiful, we expected that this would be more of the same.

Boy, were we wrong.

Bua Tong Waterfall is located in Sri Lanna National Park, 58 kilometers north of Chiang Mai (about a 90-min drive). When we arrived we stepped out of the parking lot into a field of neatly trimmed grass surrounded by tropical forest. At one end of the field was Chet Si (Seven Colors) Spring, a mineral spring of turquoise water, partially encircled by a wooden boardwalk. Several spirit houses stood nearby to honor the spirits of the spring with offerings of incense, food, and drink.

Spirit houses honoring the spirits of the spring

The spring fed a burbling stream that wound through the field and disappeared into the trees. Following the sound of laughing children, we came to a ridge over which the stream disappeared. As we approached the ridge, we could hear water splashing over rocks and saw a huddle of excited children looking over the other side. One by one, they disappeared over the edge - but the sounds of their happy shouts and chatter continued.

When we reached the spot, we looked down and gasped. The water cascaded over pillows of ivory-colored stone, as though a giant had shaped the waterfall from melted marshmallows. Rather than giant, however, it was actually the mineral water itself that had created the structures by depositing layer upon layer of limestone precipitate over every surface it touched. A lush jungle of trees framed the falls on both sides, shading the falls with leafy branches and vines.

From where we were standing, the waterfall was dizzyingly steep and looked ridiculously slippery. Yet, people of all ages clambered like geckos up and down the stones, water splashing over and around them.

I paused. Wasn’t there a safer way to reach the pools of blue water at the bottom? While I considered this, my 9-year-old spotted some friends from school among the kids below. She immediately started to climb down.

Not to be shown up, the rest of us carefully began the descent. To our surprise the minerals coating the bed of the waterfall were gritty and remarkably easy to grip. Even our 4-year-old managed it with no problems.

 

The only truly slippery areas were at the edges of the flowing water where slimy algae was able to grow. This meant that the safest place to climb was, counterintuitively, in the center of the streams. Once we figured this out, our fears (mostly) melted away and we spent the rest of the afternoon playing and marveling at the waterfall's unique beauty.

Mineral water coats everything it touches in limestone.

That evening we went home refreshed and re-committed to making the most of our remaining time in Thailand. But, even after a year full of unforgettable places, Bua Tong Waterfall stands out as one of my family’s all-time favorite trips.

If you ever find yourself in northern Thailand, I highly recommend you make a side trip to the waterfall. The best time to visit is during the dry season between October and early February. The dry season actually extends to the end of April, but between February and April smoke from the burning of agricultural fields often makes the air quality unhealthy. During the rainy season frequent heavy monsoon storms may make travel difficult and the waterfall more dangerous.

Although there is no public transportation from Chiang Mai to the waterfall, you can rent a song taew and driver to take you for between 500 and 2,000 Baht per day ($15-$60). Song taews are those ubiquitous pick-up trucks (usually red) that have been modified to carry passengers. The easiest way to arrange a rental is through your hotel or guest house. 

 

You can also book a tour to the waterfall starting at about $50 per person per day. Tours usually include transportation, a guide, and lunch.

Enjoying the waterfall with my daughter

If you’re particularly brave, you can rent a car or motorbike and drive yourself. Before you do, however, make sure you familiarize yourself with the rules (or lack of rules) for driving in Thailand. Most importantly, don’t forget that in Thailand drivers drive on the left side of the road rather than the right. And, if you’re planning to travel to the waterfall on a Thai motorbike, expect a two-hour drive.

Admission is free but there are no food vendors allowed in the park. If you’re not coming as part of a tour that includes lunch, bring your own for a picnic. Also, wear bathing suits and bring towels, sunscreen, bug spray, and a change of clothes. You might also want a small first-aid kit and some antibiotic ointment in case you get a few cuts or scrapes.

Most importantly: Have fun and take lots of pictures!

 

Nam Tok Bua Tong (Bua Tong Waterfall)

Where: Sri Lanna National Park, 58 kilometers north of Chiang Mai
What: Have fun climbing the limestone waterfalls
Best way to get there: Fly into Chiang Mai International Airport. From Chiang Mai, rent a song taew and driver to take you or book a tour that includes transportation, a guide, and lunch.
Admission: Free
Where to stay: A hotel or guest house in Chiang Mai
Where to eat: Bring a picnic lunch unless your tour includes a meal