The Little Garden that Could

Sean Cummings knows what it takes to keep a farm going – and growing. He works on his own horse- and mule-powered farm in Marathon, N.Y., and he’s also the manager of Binghamton University Acres, the University’s small farm just a short way up Bunn Hill Road from the Vestal campus.

The farm, started in 2013, is just over an acre of property, now flourishing with vegetables, fruit trees and a plan for more.

With support from volunteer farmers – mostly students and many of them in the Environmental Studies Program – Binghamton University Acres demonstrates where food comes from and what makes it healthy, Cummings said.

Speaking at a Sustainable Communities Transdisciplinary Area of Excellence talk, Cummings gave a snapshot of what he termed “The Little Garden that Could.”

“The farm was all built on student excitement,” Cummings said. “Students were the motivation for it, and since it’s all hand-based work, they’re very important to the process.

“We had planning sessions with students, wrote everything down and talked and defined our ideas and refined them into our goals outline,” Cummings explained. “It includes the kinds of things I go back to and look at when we’re deciding on next steps and what we might or might not do with the garden.”

The goals outline is a working document. “Every season when we do our summer internship program for academic credit, we gather more information, so it is a living document that changes,” Cummings said. “But it drives our decisions so is not haphazard.”

All beds are dug by hand and are now starting to reveal how worthwhile the project is, Cummings said, and there is an area now being developed to meet the agricultural criteria for the University’s Living Building Project at Nuthatch Hollow.

Because of the manual labor involved, cultivating the farm would not be practical without dozens of new people helping out each year. “I’m often impressed by the student involvement and 25 students showing up on a Saturday,” Cummings said. “It goes a long way in showing the interest students have in this farm.”

The summer internship program brings as many as 10 interns to the farm. Cummings also takes them on field trips to give them a broader perspective on farming. “I bring them to farms that have animals and find myself constantly explaining why we don’t have goats or chickens, but I like them to see the role of animals in agriculture,” he said.

At Binghamton University acres, one approach taken, in particular in the forest garden area (orchard), is to plant in polycultures – using multiple crops in the same space. “Our goal is to have as much coverage of the soil as possible,” Cummings said. “We work to control the weeds until the plants do it themselves. The idea is that through planning you can eventually minimize the amount of labor necessary.” An example of a polyculture is planting strawberries below plum trees to keep the ground covered and have two different fruits in the same space, Cummings said.

“We’re trying to build a garden that provides food for people or a benefit to plants that do provide food,” Cummings said.

“The important thing for us is that the ground is covered in our forest garden. We do very little tillage and once the area is 100 percent planted, in four to five years there won’t be any tillage in that space,” he said. “That’s a benefit, especially on that very wet landscape.

“One of the approaches we’re using to address our water issues is that we started building a swale (a ditch on a contour) and a berm (an artificial embankment) at the top of the forest garden. Below them there are a lot of places where water sits and it becomes a soggy mess, so that’s been dug for the past two seasons,” Cummings said. “And in that berm we planted a row of hazelnuts to grow straight across the site. It seems to be working and slowly going across the top of the garden. We’re trying to hold the water in place and infiltrate very slowly.”

Another example of how water can be controlled is by constructing a hugelculture bed – hugel is a German word for mound. Hugelculture utilizes beds made of mounded up decaying wood. This kind of bed allows water to be absorbed by the wood and helps mitigate a very wet area of the garden. “We’re trying to keep water on the site and manage it through absorption,” Cummings said. “We’ll be building these until the end of the season on Saturday volunteer workdays.

“One other approach we use to not disturb soil is called sheet mulching,” Cummings said. “We lay down cardboard, then cover it in compost and then mulched straw. “We use cardboard from the dining halls and we can just plant right into it in the spring.”

When asked about how much food is produced and where growth might occur, Cummings said the farm can still grow a lot more and the beds that have been dug never have to be dug again. “Plus, everything gets mulched with compost and we use extremely weed-free mulch straw that’s a management technique to reduce labor and ease gardening,” he added. “So we’re not making a dent in the campus food supply,” Cummings said. “Our emphasis has been to set up the basic infrastructure for eventually being able to produce a lot of food. We don’t currently grow that much food, so we have events like the recent Farm-to-Tapas tasting in the Chenango Room and our Fall Festival during Family Weekend, and that’s what I’m trying to fine tune.”

Future plans for the farm might see construction of a pavilion in some non-developed space, Cummings said, along with living by the farm’s goals outline.