On a Saturday morning in May, about 20 people gathered at the SCSU Community Garden in St. Cloud, Minnesota, ready to turn soil and coax life from the ground—and they're not new to this. The garden has now hummed through 22 seasons of growth, weeding, and harvest, becoming the kind of place that draws volunteers back year after year, like Marilyn Nelson, who has spent the past ten years there and now brings friends along to experience what she calls "the beauty" of the space.
This matters because community gardens do more than grow vegetables. They grow belonging. Tracy Ore, the garden's director and a Sociology professor at SCSU, started this one in 2005 after visiting community gardens in Detroit, Michigan, with her students. She had almost no gardening experience at the time—a detail that almost no one believed would matter. "A lot of people thought this was a crazy idea, and it would never work," Ore said. "And I can say, 22 years later, it has worked."
The garden blooms with variety. On that May 30 morning, volunteers prepared the North garden bed for planting by weeding, laying down fabric, and setting up irrigation while Ore directed the effort. By day's end, tomatoes had gone into the soil. Come June 6, the main planting day will bring peppers, cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower into the beds. This diversity serves a purpose beyond nutrition. "We try to grow a diversity of crops … so students who are coming from other places, and communities, and cultures, they're always surprised when they see something that's familiar," Ore explained. A newcomer, Jill Moorthy, captures the feeling: "People are just amazed by [the garden] … It's kind of overwhelming in a really good way."
This year brings something unprecedented: the Husky Tomato, a non-GMO variety developed over four generations through collaboration between the garden and SCSU's biology program. This summer marks the first time it will grow outside a controlled environment—a research trial that turns a quarter-century garden into a living lab.
What's remarkable is how the garden sustains itself. SCSU provided a startup fund of approximately $5,000 in 2005, but that's the only university money it has ever received. Everything else—the soil revival, the expansion, the innovation—has come from pickle and jam sales, grants, and the commitment of people who show up. The soil itself tells a story of resurrection. When Ore started, the plot had poor earth. Through consistent tilling, composting, and soil testing, she and her volunteers revived it. For the past five to six years, they haven't needed to add compost because the land has become that healthy.
Looking forward, Ore is thinking bigger. A grant from the SCSU Foundation Husky Impact Funds will bring four paid student ambassadors to the garden, expanding a network that now connects five campus units. With those resources, Ore plans to launch free cooking demonstrations at the campus food pantry, teaching students to prepare meals on a budget. Her long-term vision is bolder still: acquiring the house in the middle of the garden lot and transforming it into a food education and preservation center, complete with student housing and a café that could serve the culinary program at St. Cloud Technical and Community College. From a single plot of tired earth to a future food and learning hub—the garden Ore planted in doubt continues to grow.