Garden as Classroom

James O’Rourke (B.A. ‘85) has worked at New York Tech for 43 years, but the real fruits of his labor are in the garden behind Balding House on the Long Island campus.

New York Tech is home to six schools and colleges, but a little-known fact is that the university’s Long Island campus is also home to a lush garden filled with fruits, vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, and even a butterfly garden. Tucked behind Balding House in the southeast corner of campus, the garden is an agricultural oasis where students, faculty, and staff are welcome to visit and, if they run into garden manager James O’Rourke (B.A. ’85), encounter his infectious enthusiasm for (plant) life.

O’Rourke, an operations foreman in Capital Planning and Facilities, has worked at the university for 43 years. He has witnessed countless classes of students step onto campus for the first time and participate in commencement four years later. So he knows a thing or two about growth. Fittingly, O’Rourke has managed the garden since its grand opening in 2013.

“The fact that you can put a little seed in the ground, and it develops into something that you can eat and feed people with is pretty amazing to me,” says the man with the green thumb, who has more than 30 tomato plants in his home garden. “Gardening is also therapeutic. You come down here [to the school garden], and it’s peace and quiet.”

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Open Photo Gallery

School of Health Professions students are frequent garden visitors. Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Mindy Haar, Ph.D., RDN, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Lorraine Mongiello, DrPH, RDN, bring their students to the green space to educate them on the health benefits of incorporating fresh produce into their diets, introduce them to new foods, and teach them—with O’Rourke’s guidance—how to plant and harvest crops. The next garden tour for School of Health Professions students is set for September.

Granting Growth

Haar and Mongiello have also secured several grants to support and develop the garden. Most recently, in fall 2021, the National Association of College Auxiliary Services (NACAS) awarded the school a year-long, $5,000 grant to support the Bear Bytes Grizzly Cupboard food pantry through fresh produce grown in the garden. This grant assisted in revitalizing and expanding the garden, enabling students on the New York City and Long Island campuses to receive fresh, homegrown food through the Grizzly Cupboard.

The New York Tech community isn’t the only garden beneficiary. During the summer, when the pantry is closed, O’Rourke brings much of his harvests to his hometown food pantry at St. Patrick Church in Glen Cove, N.Y., providing the local population with much-needed fresh produce.

O’Rourke has contributed significantly to the garden’s improvement as well. What started as a bare-bones patch of soil with a few plants has now been transformed to include more than 50 different crops, including fruit trees like apricots, nectarines, and Granny Smith apples. Concord grapes and hops twine around trellises. Herbs like cilantro, thyme, lemon balm, oregano, chives, and rosemary scent the area. Blueberries, boysenberries, strawberries, and raspberries are peppered throughout the space—and bell peppers can be found growing as well. Corn stalks slowly shoot skyward as watermelon and pumpkin leaves begin to flourish. Broccoli, Swiss chard, radishes, carrots, string beans, tomatoes, beets, onions, garlic, and more comprise the list of all that O’Rourke cares for daily.

“I began gardening with my mother as a young boy. My mother’s parents were what you would call ‘naturalists,’ and they encouraged me in my gardening interests,” says O’Rourke, who has become something of an expert gardener himself through observation, talking to other gardeners, and simple trial and error. “Gardening is like a science experiment.”

An Allen Foundation grant awarded in 2018 afforded him the opportunity to rebuild the garden’s three raised plant beds, making them more accessible for visitors with physical limitations, construct seven additional plant beds, and lay and configure a drip irrigation system that is buried underneath. Every day the system turns on and off automatically to give the plant beds a sprinkle of water. The rest of the garden is hand watered.

Learning the Way

In a report sent to the Allen Foundation at the conclusion of the grant period in 2019, during which Mongiello and Haar hosted more than 600 students and Adele Smithers Parkinson’s Disease Treatment Center clinic patients in an experiential-learning food and nutrition curriculum, the two health professionals noted “overwhelmingly positive” participant feedback.

“For the vast majority, this is the students’ first experience tending a garden,” they said in the report. “It is evident that this experience affected the way they think about the process of producing and accessing food, the environment, health, and the incorporation of nutrition into the practice of medicine.”

In addition to educational modules, other experiential learning activities during the grant period in the 2018–2019 academic year included College of Osteopathic Medicine students’ Culinary Medicine Club picking herbs to modify meals for a patient, the Adele Smithers Parkinson’s Disease Treatment Center bringing patients to learn about diet and wellness best practices, and one student spearheading a campus-wide compost initiative to recycle food waste into usable fertilizer.

Now, kitchens campus-wide will hold onto food scraps, like fruits, vegetables, coffee grinds, and eggshells, which O’Rourke then picks up and uses in the garden’s compost chamber. The six-week composting process also utilizes carbon-rich sawdust from the School of Architecture and Design to aid in the breakdown process of compost materials. O’Rourke rotates the compost chamber each day and, once it is ready, mixes the natural fertilizer into the garden soil to promote plant growth.

Anyone on campus is welcome to take a stroll through the New York Tech garden and witness the crops’ progress, and if one is lucky enough to run into O’Rourke while there, they’re likely to leave with a small harvest.