Students sell produce at the farm stand outside the Gibbs House.
KALAMAZOO, Mich.—A seven-layer perennial "food forest" on the west side of WMU's Gibbs House property is a complex ecosystem, though still in its infancy. Much of the fledgling forest was last year the unpaved driveway to a soccer field, and thus largely hardpan, stony, not very fertile.
But the land and the students working it are resilient, demonstrating that careful planning and planting will over time return vitality to what was once barren.
"It's all nut- and fruit-producing plants that mimic the interactions between species that you see in a normal forest," says Josh Shultz, the property's permaculture program coordinator.
"We have all seven different trophic levels."
A 'living laboratory'
This area of knee- and shoulder-high trees along with other plantings is part of the nearly two-acre property anchored by the 160-year-old Gibbs farmhouse on the edge of WMU's Parkview Campus.
Dr. Harold Glasser, executive director for campus sustainability and professor of environmental and sustainability studies, describes the operation as a "living, learning laboratory for modeling sustainability in everyday life."
Hoop houses extend growing seasons.
East of the food forest are the annual vegetable gardens that produced 63 different crops this summer. Nearby the gardens are plots crowded with beds of native wild flowers adjacent to compost mounds. Two large student-built hoop houses hosted tomato plants, Swiss chard, loofa squash, leeks and other crops this summer. And the hoop houses will help extend the growing season to Thanksgiving and beyond.
Harvested carrots, eggplant, garlic, green beans, squash, peppers and other vegetables were sold on site at the student-run Friday Farm Stand, to campus catering services for outside events, as well as to some local food truck vendors.
"We're teaching students how to grow food and show them that they can grow it in ways that are more sustainable than conventional methods that use chemicals, herbicides and pesticides. We don't use any of that here," says Shultz, a 2009 graduate of WMU's business management and environmental studies programs.
"This is all natural."
In addition to working the land to grow food using methods that harmonize with the natural environment, students also conduct related research. Some of these student researchers—Gibbs House fellows—live in the farmhouse.
'Natural' research
In one experiment, mechanical engineering student Kelsey Pitschel created a subterranean radiant heating system, drawing heat from a large woodchip compost pile, to keep the root zones of greenhouse plants warm through Michigan's bitterly cold winters.
Students and staff also are testing different types of insulation below ground. They've buried empty glass wine bottles encased in cob (clay and straw) in one hoop house bed, straw wrapped in a vapor barrier is below another, and one bed sits atop extruded polystyrene sheets.
"The standard is to use polystyrene. But that stuff has some pretty negative environmental impacts both in production and disposal. We're trying to not support things like that," Shultz explains.
"So we're tracking the soil temperature, the water temperature, the soil moisture content of all of these beds, and we'll use the data we get to compare these types of insulation to see which ones work and which ones don't."
Gibbs House fellow Eli Lowry, a senior in the geography program, oversees a composting unit that uses red wiggler worms to break down food waste, a fertilizer-production method known as vermicomposting. Bacteria break down the food, the worms eat the bacteria and leave behind nutrient-rich castings as the byproduct.
"Probably one of the best fertilizers you can get," Lowry says. "It's really high in organic matter and microbial activity."
Part of the appeal of vermicomposting is the speed at which the worms create the compost—in weeks versus several months.
"Right now, we're feeding them about 50 pounds of food waste a week. It's a good way to handle the food waste that we produce on site and other places on campus," he says.
About the Gibbs House
The Gibbs House is named for John Gibbs, a New York man who bought the property and built the house some 160 years ago. The site is part of a much larger parcel the University acquired in 1959 that is today the Parkview Campus, home of the engineering college, the WMU Business Technology Research Park and a soccer field.
Read more about the Gibbs House and the research based there in The WMU Magazine.
For more news, arts and events, visit wmich.edu/news.