The fields glowed pink in the last streaks of daylight as students and community members gathered in the Eagle Heights Community Gardens to celebrate the harvest and the end of the growing season with F.H. King Students for Sustainable Agriculture.
The Harvest Festival was F.H. King’s way of celebrating its growing season and the community that made it possible, while at the same time advocating for sustainable agriculture and drawing attention to food insecurity on campus, according to F.H.King leaders
“Harvest Fest is a huge celebration of all the relationships that have been made,” said Education Director Rena Yehuda Newman. “It is a huge part of our mission, which is to connect people, land and food. We’re celebrating what the earth has given us.”
Most seasons, F.H. King harvests more than 2,900 pounds of produce — all of which it distributes to students on campus. With some crops still in the ground, this year’s numbers aren't in yet, but student gardeners have been tending the F.H. King plots since April and have distributed free “Harvest Handouts” around campus every Friday since June.
“The entire student body is paying for this to exist, which I find particularly wonderful, and in certain ways, even utopian,” Newman said. “There’s something particularly beautiful embedded in the structure of our organization, which believes that people should be paid for the labor that they do, and that that labor should benefit the rest of the community.”
While Wimbledon, a local band, jammed on a plywood set, guests played games and shared a potluck dinner. Some had spent their entire summer working in the garden, but for others, this was their first time at Eagle Heights, the university’s 6-acre community garden that lies adjacent to Picnic Point.
For those first-timers, Programming Director Andrea Seiler said she hoped that experiencing the garden at Harvest Fest will open doors to opportunities to practice sustainable agriculture on campus in the future.
"Most folks don't have enough time to connect to food and land in a meaningful way," Seiler said. "Its such a privilege and a gift to be able to spend time in that beautiful, natural space, and to be able to learn from the garden — to see how things grow."
“It takes infrastructure and it takes community to create sustainable produce,” they said. “This garden is such a special place because we can see on a microscale what a community farm really looks like.”
With the first frosts already on the ground, the festival marked the end of F.H. King’s outdoor growing season. But Newman said the organization will continue to focus on issues like food insecurity through the winter.
“We’re really concerned about the distribution of food and resources,” Newman said. “We go to a multi-million dollar campus. There’s no reason why any student should go hungry. We think that it’s important as an organization to recognize our own limits, and in recognizing our limits, expand the conversation.”
