Community garden knits closer ties

Nearly 90 Hopkins students and Baltimore community members gathered at the Johns Hopkins Eastern Campus on Saturday, Apr. 28 to celebrate the opening of Hopkins’ newest community garden.

The garden, known as the Blue Jay Perch, is a result of the collaboration between Hopkins students and staff working with community members from the Waverly neighborhood.

Many plots of land in the Blue Jay Perch have been designated as “partner plots” and are being jointly tended by Hopkins affiliates and student groups working together with churches, schools and community groups in Waverly. The Hopkins and Waverly groups will tend these plots together and will share the harvest in the fall.

So far, the program has matched three Hopkins groups with three Waverly groups. Many more Hopkins groups are interested in forming partnerships and are reaching out to potential counterparts in Waverly, according to Raychel Santo. Santo, a sophomore double majoring in Public Health and Global Environmental Change and Sustainability, is the president of Real Food Hopkins and an organizer of the community garden.

“We’re doing this because we want to bring the Hopkins and Waverly communities together,” Santo said.  “There’s a lot we can learn from one another. This project is about building relationships as much as growing food.”

Santo also mentioned the need to bring together undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff from across the University.

“The undergraduates don’t even interact much with the grad students, except for TAs,” Santo noted. “This is a way to introduce people who might never otherwise see each other. We’ve had professors come and bring their kids. It’s a great way for the community to bond together.”

The garden is a quarter of an acre. Some plots are designated for Hopkins-Waverly partnerships, while others are designated for the individual use of Hopkins students, staff or community members.

Students and community members have been working on this project for over a year, Santo said.  There is also a community garden in back of the Center for Social Concern. However, the garden behind the CSC is small, and the community has outgrown it.

Santo hopes that the Blue Jay Perch will continue to grow.

“As we get more established, we hope to get more involvement from the community,” she explains.

Still, Santo is encouraged by how far the project has come. “We started planning this last spring. It’s great to see an entire garden emerging just a year later.”