What’s Growing at UOP’s Robb Garden?

For Janet Setser being the Garden Coordinator for the University of the Pacific's Robb Garden isn't just a job, it is a way of life. She has a vast knowledge of gardens and healthy eating from her travels around the world, especially Central Asia, she intends to share with her students and the larger Stockton community.

Her recent appointment as the Garden Coordinator for the Robb Garden will allow Janice to not only spend more time with her aging mom, but also support and share her passion for gardening on a grand scale. She is excited at the opportunity to teach students and the community how to grow healthy fruits and veggies and expand the community's knowledge about plants from around the world. She also looks forward to sharing information about the medicinal uses of plants from around the world.

In 2008, Pacific students Fiona Kelly and Vinny Johl initiated the campus food garden. Former Pacific Regent Walter Robb, who at the time was CEO of Whole Foods Market, provided financial support to create the garden. Janice plans expand the diversity and develop the garden to include year-round veggies, fruits, flowers, herbs and plants grown locally and from other countries.

Janice and her small cadre of students and community gardeners are developing a hands-on approach to learning not only how to grow produce, but also to gain a better understanding about the importance of creating healthy soil, growing more diverse plants, and being a more sustainable gardening operation.

She is also striving to bring more students as well as community members, young and old, with or without gardening experience, to the garden. She hopes her outreach into the community will bring interested volunteers to the garden to learn as well as share their knowledge of gardening with familiar as well as the unfamiliar fruits, vegetables, herbs and weeds from other parts of the world.

To help Janice in the garden and gain hands-on experience are four hired staff members and interns that work 6-8 hours each week, along with a host of volunteers to learn all they can about the garden and sustainable living. Produce grown in the garden is available to students to purchase and what ever is left over does not go to waste but is made available in the student food pantry.

As the result of her travels around the world, she intends to create opportunities to introduce students and volunteers to unfamiliar plants and weeds she has encountered not only for food, but for medicinal purposes as well.

High on her to-do list is to go beyond growing a year-round garden to help students and community members learn to live more sustainable lives by using less and not just tossing everything in the trash. She is teaching each of her students how to “grow” a compost pile made up of daily waste such as dead leaves, branches, twigs, food scraps, coffee grounds, paper, and other organic matter. Not only does compost reduce the amount of waste that goes into the landfill, it also provides the garden a valuable fertilizer to enrich soil and plants naturally. Composting is such an important component of the garden that Janice requires each student to work a compost pile as part of his/her garden duties.

Her immediate plans for the future are to provide her students with more hands-on volunteer opportunities in the garden and develop a “curriculum that is adequately simple” to allow students to replicate.