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Spartanburg Community College s School of Horticulture held a grand opening Tuesday
for a project many months in the making. The horticulture faculty formally introduced
their new Sustainable Agriculture program with a ribbon cutting for the program s
new outdoor classroom.
The classroom contains about a dozen gardening beds, several of them raised beds,
a decorative silo, an archway trellis, a barn that has a large open area for events,
indoor lectures and project workshops, as well as a kitchen area for cleaning and
sorting produce.
This is intensive agriculture in a small-scale footprint, said Jason Bagwell, SCC
Horticulture Programs department chairman.
The first three classes of the Sustainable Agriculture program were conducted in the
outdoor classroom this summer, in a session that ran from May-July. Students in sustainable
agriculture, permaculture and farm-to-market courses produced the first crops. The
classes taught and implemented organic, sustainable approaches to grow the produce.
The garden is currently in transition for fall, according to horticulture instructor
Jay Moore. And while they ve chosen to keep some of their summer crops, like peas,
black beans and peppers, they have swapped out others for broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage
and beets.
Our goal is to teach them as many different plants that they can grow in this area
to make a business out of it or sustain themselves, Bagwell said.
The produce from the summer semester was weighed and distributed among the faculty
and staff at the college, the students in the class, and the downtown Miracle Hill
mission.
They said it was some of the best-quality produce that they ve ever gotten, Moore
said. So that was real good to see, to see people really excited about what we ve
produced.
The outdoor classroom was made possible by a grant from the Mary Black Foundation.
Our mission is to improve health and wellness in Spartanburg, and one of the ways
that we do that is by increasing access to healthy foods and active living, said Molly
Talbot-Metz, president and CEO of the Mary Black Foundation. So this was a great opportunity
for us to provide some grant dollars to support the work happening here. We were really
attracted by the relationship between the college and the community and the opportunity
to give back.
The program addresses interests and needs for those off campus as well as on, SCC
president Henry Giles said.
We had one of the County Council members who was a student in the program this summer
and left his regular work to come here to work in the afternoons and to learn what
he could about gardening. It was a passion that he had and wanted to develop, Giles
said. So we reach a lot of different people in this community through programs like
this, because this is not a two-year landscape design (program), this one is designed
where you could do that, but this would be an add-on or it could be standalone for
a person who just wants to have a good garden and raise things for their families.
Faculty said that the program s first summer run was successful. Will Taylor, who
graduated from SCC in May with a degree in horticulture and returned later the same
month to begin a certificate in sustainable agriculture, said the class taught him
about another side of agriculture.
I enjoyed it, learned a good bit about how to do things without machinery as much,
Taylor said. I hadn t grown up on a full-blown agriculture place, but we used a tractor
and a tiller and all that, and here you re more of what can we do without that? We
used a whole bunch of tools, and a lot of teamwork was involved with everything around
here.
Taylor said that there was a huge difference in the way the outdoor classroom looks
now from the way it looked a year ago, and according to Bagwell, the changes won t
be stopping any time soon.
There are several phases we re hoping will take place, maybe starting later this
year, Bagwell said. First of all, we want a greenhouse put in because we re starting
two new courses on top of the three we started (during the summer). As far as other
infrastructure goes, we re hoping to have bees in the spring to really enhance pollination.
The garden will become a mini-farm by the time all the additions are made. Bagwell
said that courses in beekeeping would be coming, and the program hopes to bring in
chickens and goats, both sustainable forms of income. Eventually, he hopes the barn
will be solar powered.
Education: That s what we re trying to do, as much as possible, Bagwell said.