Merritt College urban garden class sows “practical skills”

Every Tuesday morning, Tom Branca and his students gather far from Merritt College’s campus in the Oakland hills to the heart of Lake Merritt. For the past eight years, he and his students have come by the lake to clear vegetal detritus and harvest crops, with the butterflies overhead and the lizards underfoot.

Branca is the instructor for Merritt College’s Urban Community Garden, an open access course located on two plots of land at the Lakeside Park Garden Center. There, Branca shepherds students into the world of gardening, where they learn how to construct gardens, produce food crops, and set up drip irrigation systems. vegetable food production, garden construction, and drip irrigation.

The class works on a slightly different schedule than the Peralta Community College District’s semester system. According to Branca, students take a break around the December holidays, and resume their work before the semester officially starts in January or beyond when it ends in May.

An assortment of seasonal vegetables grow at the garden almost year-round thanks to the Bay Area’s unique climate zones. Bright stalks of rhubarb await harvest as vining tomatoes finish their season in the raised garden beds. Even the peppers, usually an early summer crop, ripens on the trellis it climbs.

Branca’s roots in Lake Merritt

To Branca, Lake Merritt is his stomping grounds. He was a member of the East Bay Urban Gardeners, a community of urban farmers who tended to plots at the Lakeside Park Garden Center in the ‘90s.

The movement of urban farming in the Bay Area followed one of California’s most major droughts, between 1986 to 1992. He first wrote the course material for today’s classes in 1994, modeling it after the movement’s principles.

Branca still works the same plot of land at Lake Merritt that he did back then, now with his students.

He received his bachelor’s degree in botany at University of California, Berkeley in 1976, and his masters in environmental horticulture at University of California, Davis in 1980.

But Branca said that his “love for plants” came while he was studying communications at Laney College and spending time with friends at Lake Merritt.

Branca taught horticulture at Merritt in 1980 for six years before serving as a department chair until 2010. He retired in 2012, coming out of retirement in 2017 to teach Urban Community Gardening.

 

Student’s “practical skills” blossom in community

Sept. 23 was Ash McGregor’s first day in the Urban Community Gardening class. She lives in the surrounding neighborhood, only a walking distance from the garden plots at Lake Merritt.

“Me and my boyfriend decided to go back to school after 10 plus years. We really want to learn practical skills,” McGregor said.

She said her boyfriend is learning carpentry at Laney. The two of them don’t have the space for a garden at home, so the community garden offers McGregor a chance to learn farming skills that she wouldn’t otherwise have convenient access to.

Michelle Fahlsing is a registered nurse and started gardening about three years ago. This was her third class with Branca. Fahlsing found similar abilities were needed for both medicine and gardening: patience and tending.

While she knows her way around herbs and flowers, she said she’s in the class for more experience in vegetable growing.

“These days, the more practical skills, the better,” Fahlsing said. She uses calendula flower petals from the garden to make salves for her healing practice.

Eriana “Chef E” Moore said the plants’ slow, sustained growth makes her appreciate the time investment of growing and preparing food. Moore graduated from Laney last year with a degree in restaurant management. She’s now pursuing a degree in horticulture at Merritt.

Anne Olson similarly appreciates the journey “from start to finish” with the crops. She happily tends to the community garden, but her favorite part of the class is giving back.

At the end of the hour, the week’s yield is picked up by a volunteer from a local organization.

Mary Lou Solecki gathered up the bags of harvest from Branca’s students to bring to the Hope Center in Berkeley, a housing project with an onsite chef, who prepares meals with the fresh produce.

Since Sept. 24, the classes’ Wednesday workdays have been spent stewarding the plots at the new horticulture building at Merritt.

They’ll be back at Lake Merritt every following Tuesday. Students peel off, one by one, and then Branca closes up the plot.