On a recent hot afternoon, students from Boise State's environmental studies and conservation courses visited Global Gardens. The nonprofit supports farmers who came to the U.S. as refugees. Farmers grow chemical-free produce for local markets and community-supported agriculture, or CSAs, that deliver vegetables to weekly subscribers. The organization sells produce to local restaurants and shares it with food pantries.

Throughout the afternoon, students collected soil and air temperatures at the garden on the Boise Bench - one of eight Global Garden sites in the city. The students' measurements will contribute to a growing database that can help growers understand local conditions. In particular, students are studying whether urban gardens cool the soil. They are also gathering data on air quality and asking how urban farms or green spaces affect it. This citizen science project will also develop a protocol for other farmers and community members to monitor these effects in the future, Associate Professor Lisa Meierotto said.

During the visit, conversation topics ranged from flood irrigation to growing corn crops of mixed varieties - some grown from traditional African seed, as many Global Gardens farmers are from Somalia and Congo - to the benefits of enriching soil with green manure. Though the harvest was winding down for the season and the garden rows were quiet, they were alive with pollinators, the odd snake and patches of beneficial native grasses. Grass seeds can lie dormant for years, sprouting when light, water and nutrients are in the right balance. That's happening here.

"I brought my students to learn more about refugee connections and access to green spaces in the city," Professor Libby Lunstrum said.

Land in Boise is valuable, and Global Gardens' Bench site, on a plot leased from the City of Boise, is no exception. The value of this space makes it vulnerable. Meierotto and Lunstrum want their students to think about who has access to land and why preserving it matters. They want students to see firsthand how a place like this garden benefits new Boise residents, financially and culturally. Many of the Global Garden growers are expert farmers who, in return, share their considerable knowledge with the community.

Video transcript

(light, inspiring acoustic music)

[Lisa Meierotto]: My students are in Environmental Justice class, and every year that I teach that, we always try to work with a community partner to give back. So environmental justice is a scholarly field, but it's also a practice. One of the hallmarks of environmental justice practice is doing what's called citizen science, and so figuring out how community members can collect their own data to advocate for remediation or increasing air quality. This semester, we are trying something new. It's a little bit experimental, but the students are in groups collecting data on air quality, air temperature and soil temperature, and they'll be collecting data to kind of try to understand if the data points are different, like in the middle of a Global Gardens plot, or say, on an asphalt area around town. And then in addition to collecting the data, they're going to be writing up a method, and at the end of the semester, we will share both our findings and our methods with our community partners in the hopes that they can continue that kind of data collection.

(laughs) (music)

[Libby Lunstrum] So I'm teaching a course at Boise State called Biodiversity Conservation, which is upper division Environmental Studies and Masters of Environmental Management students.

And the point of that course is to introduce students to the human side of biodiversity conservation. And I thought Global Gardens would be a great experience for them to think about green spaces. And we often think about biodiversity conservation as something that happens outside, like in the national parks, away from us. And one of the things we're trying to think about in the course is, like, it also happens in our backyards. So really important to bring the students here to think about green space, and what does green space look like in the city? Who has access to it? Why is it important to biodiversity conservation? And we looked at that today in terms of the importance of a space like this for pollinators, that there's a lot more pollinators that you would see in a garden like this than you would see in a parking lot, which was the initial intention of this site.

What's valuable about being out here out in the field and being able to get my hands in the dirt is that I'm able to contribute to citizen science and help out my community. This data that I'm going to collect in this experience I can put towards helping out Global Gardens and continuing their work, and also just making sure that the community knows that this place is around and how cool it is, and just how important it is for our refugee community here in Boise.

(music ends)

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