As you drive onto Azusa Pacific University’s East Campus on a Monday morning, if you look to the right, you’ll notice a handful of students bent over, tending to plants, plucking weeds, and picking fresh fruit. These students are caring for the Community Garden while earning service credits under the direction of Bradley “Peanut” McCoy, PhD, chair and professor, Department of Computer Science; Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics (CEMPS), and his wife, Beth, PhD, SE, PE, adjunct professor in CEMPS.
“APU is a community of disciples and scholars,” Peanut McCoy said. “We’re building relationships and educational opportunities in a nonclassroom setting, cultivating a love of stewardship of our plants.”
The Community Garden has four primary goals: growing produce for student consumption, creating a space outside the classroom for faculty/staff interaction with students, supporting collaborative learning on campus, and facilitating community outreach.
Free Food for Students
All produce from the garden is available to students free of charge. The front of the garden has a flyer with instructions on how to pick, as well as a QR code to log how much and what types of produce you pick.
“Students can take as much as they’d like, they’re not limited at all; (the log is) just for record keeping,” Beth McCoy said. “We are also collaborating with APU’s Food Pantry to distribute a rotating menu of meal kits, including produce items from the garden along with a recipe and necessary pantry items from the Food Pantry.”
Last year, students logged more than 400 pounds of food picked from the garden. This year, the goal is 700 pounds, or more than $10,000 worth of produce. Throughout the year, the garden is full of many varieties of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. In the winter, this includes American broccoli, Chinese broccoli, kale, mustard greens, lettuce, carrots, beets, shelling peas, sugar snap peas, and snow peas. Dining Services will lead a workshop in the next month to show students how to cook peas in healthy recipes. During the summer, the garden is full of tomatoes, green beans, okra, zucchini, peppers, pomegranates, plums, apples, and berries.
We also tend many fruit trees and bushes around campus, including oranges, lemons, kumquats, loganberries, blackberries, boysenberries, raspberries, and more pomegranates,” Beth McCoy said. “Students are also welcome to pick these fruits from trees around campus whenever they’d like to.
During the fall, the garden produces avocados and fruit from a hybrid pomelo-grapefruit tree. There are also plans to plant several beds of strawberries around campus and move a blossoming grape vine to a fence in University Village because it’s outgrowing its current home in the garden.
In early 2024, planting beds between the Alumni House and the baseball field were converted to dry climate herbs, including two varieties of Mexican oregano, Greek oregano, za’atar, rosemary, savory, and thyme. This winter, plans are in place to expand the Asian herb offerings to include lemongrass, ginger, turmeric, Vietnamese cilantro, and shiso.
“We’ve given away lots of herbs at the Campus Life Farmers Market and other campus events,” Peanut McCoy said. “We work with ethnic student organizations to ask what herbs they like to use in their native cooking.”
Service Opportunities for Students
When the Community Garden opened in 2018, it was mostly run by faculty and staff, with a few one-time work days each semester for student help. That all changed in fall 2022 when the Office of Service and Discipleship began offering weekly service credit opportunities for students to help in the garden. Every semester since then, about 15 students per week have come to tend the plants with Beth and Peanut McCoy and their two daughters, Ruth and Lydia. Ruth, age 3, knows all the plants in the garden and enjoys working with students, showing them how to properly pick fruit. Claire Adams ’24, a senior animation and visual effects and honors humanities major, said she’s learned far more about gardening than she ever thought she would, a lot of it from Ruth: “I’ve been working in the garden all fall semester, and honestly, I wish I had started way earlier, it’s been so much fun. I love picking the sugar snap peas with Ruth. It’s also helped me develop patience: Plants take time to grow, and it’s nice to come here week after week and see the fruits of our labor.”
Adams found out about the gardening opportunity from her friend Faith Riehm ’24, a fellow animation and visual effects major. Riehm said she had never grown plants before, so she’s enjoyed learning all the components of the process.
“Now I know how to compost, how to graft trees, and how to use power tools (from building a miniature greenhouse),” Riehm said. “Plus, it gives me an excuse to spend a couple of hours every week outside, away from screens, which is so refreshing.”
Office Hours Outside of the Office
Peanut McCoy loves working in the garden so much that he decided to move his weekly office hours there too. Katie Fitzgerald, PhD, assistant professor, CEMPS, Sharon McCathern, former associate professor, MPS, and Elijah Roth, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Biology and Chemistry, have followed suit. These faculty made the decision partially because it removed the physical-distance barrier for students—their offices are in Segerstrom Science Center on West Campus, which is far from where many students live on East Campus.
The students prefer that it’s a neutral space, which removes the power differential and makes it easier for them to ask for the help they need,” Peanut McCoy said. “Every professor who has started doing office hours out here has found that their attendance increases, and in turn, students’ academic success increases.
He said he once even helped a student volunteer at the garden pick a major and chart his courses to graduate on time.
Community Connection
Although run by APU students, faculty, and staff, the garden benefits the Azusa and Glendora communities as well, through free workshops for Azusa’s Youth and Family Services, after school garden clubs at a growing number of Azusa Unified elementary schools, and the City of Glendora, where the McCoys and APU students go to teach children about taking care of plants.
“We’re also really excited for the seed library at the Azusa City Library, which launched last April,” Beth McCoy said. “Last year, we received an anonymous donation with several thousand seed packets for tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, beets, and green beans. APU student interns are helping the librarians give the seeds out as a way to make vegetable gardening more accessible to anyone in the community.”
Research Opportunities
While most of the work that students are doing in the garden is outside of class, a select group of students in a variety of majors are conducting research there and in a new research plot on west campus, just north of the Segerstrom Science Center, under faculty guidance.
“We’re doing small-scale horticultural research focusing on problems that are relevant to home and community gardens,” Beth McCoy said. “The Canyon City Chile project is using traditional plant breeding methods in a novel community-based science model to develop a modern landrace chile that is well-suited to the microclimate of Azusa. In addition to pursuing new-to-APU agricultural research, this project also includes science education research questions and expands APU faculty members’ pursuit of high quality STEM education research.” Ongoing research is also examining ways to keep aphids out of broccoli.
She noted that although the produce from the garden is not certified organic, the garden is completely pesticide free.
Growing Plants and Faith
The garden plans to feature Meditation Mondays, which are scheduled to launch in the spring. “We’ll have QR codes here, in the Rose Garden, the prayer garden, the cactus garden, and on the patio in Segerstrom with links to devotionals that change each week,” Beth McCoy said.
Led by Windy Counsell Petrie, PhD, chair and professor of the Department of English, this will give faculty, staff, and students a space to pause, pray, and connect with God outside. “It’s important to take time to appreciate God’s creation in the garden,” Peanut McCoy said. “We appreciate the provisions that the garden gives us as we take care of it.”
Support from Sprouts Grant
In August 2024, the APU Community Garden received an $8,000 grant from the Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation to support APU student food security. This grant will support a new initiative, Produce on Your Porch, which is providing 75 students with all of the necessary resources and gardening instruction to grow their own 10 gallon container garden on their porch in the Shire Mods, University Village, or off campus housing. Participating students will also receive peer support for preparing desirable and nutritious meals using produce from the APU Community Garden and pantry staples.
This grant also supports expansion of existing campus food plantings, including new fruit plantings in the University Village apartments and renovation of rooftop planters at the Segerstrom Science Center.
If you would like to support the Community Garden, email [email protected] to set up drop-offs, or designate your gift for the garden on APU’s giving page.