Service Learning

The Service Learning I took part in was helping the Campus Community Farm. Tyler and I volunteered for a couple hours. The name of the event organizer was Leah.

This event was organized by the Campus Community Farm of Edmonds Community College, and our goal today was to clean up a lot of the plants. Some plants were incorrectly cut which put us into surgeon mode, we were using clippers to cut off dead stems so that the plant would be less susceptible to disease.

Along with cutting off rotting stems and leaves, we were cleaning off dead leaves and debris to make the garden look nicer, a maintenance type of work.

This experience affected me because it showed me how we as people can aid the survival of these plants by preventing them from getting infected. It shows a correlation from us and plants, it is like when we need to get an arm amputated because of a spreading disease, we need to get rid of the whole arm to prevent the disease from spreading to the rest of the body. If humans can help with a simple task like this in a farm, humans can definitely do this on a grand scale and aid the survival of our nature by preventing disease and such. Humans are impacting every square inch of this planet, if more people pay attention to their actions and realize we are harming the environment, more people will take at least small steps like we have in these service learning activities. What we learn from Marine Biology is interdisciplinary. We can apply the knowledge from Marine Biology to Human Biology. We see in Marine Biology how organisms in the sea do much better when the water is clean and less polluted than organisms who have water conditions that are acidic(ocean acidification). We can relate this to human biology because we see places like some cities in China that are very polluted and people struggle to survive because of the poor air quality, it is the same with aquatic life. In the farm today some plants were well off, others were not. We did our best to remove rotten pieces that were growing and damaging the plants. As we did this we made sure not to step with too much force on the soil because if we did, the soil would be compacted and it would not be good for the plants to grow. If we as humans make the effort to aid the survival of the ecosystem especially keystone species, we could see positive changes and try to "rewild" our environment.

Questions:
1. What do they put in the soil to make sure these plants have what they need to grow?
2. Which plants grow in the summer, and which grow in the winter?
3. Do the Kale Plants produce different tasting Kale than processed Kale from like Winco or something?
4. Is it possible to see invasive species in these gardens?