SUU Community Gardens

About

The SUU Community Gardens is a program focused on teaching and supporting small and sustainable agriculture and horticulture by organizing students, faculty, and community volunteers.

Come volunteer currently every Monday at 5 PM in the Original Garden and Wednesday at 4 PM in CEC Garden.

Original Garden

Located at 296 S 500 W, Cedar City, UT 84720. Established in 2020 by the SUU Sustainability Club with partnership with SUU Facilities. This space is where it all started. In this space we focus on education, experimentation, composting, plant breeding, seed collection, and creating a communal outdoor space.

Composting

Currently closed to dumping. We use the Berkeley Method of hot compost by taking fresh green (nitrogen rich) material from SUU Dining, pre-consumer food scraps, brown (carbon rich) material of leaves gathered from around campus by facilities that would otherwise go to the dump and manure taken from the SUU farm.

In FY23 we collected and composted 2.8 tons or 5,600 lbs of food scraps from the kitchen.

All compost is currently then used in the garden spaces.

CEC Garden

Starting in 2024 in partnership with the Community Engagement Center we have started a second garden space near the University Campus Services more focused on food production. As the part of the partnership all food produced in this Garden will be going to the SUU Food Pantry.

Seed Libraries

We started our first seed library in the front area of the SUU library in 2023 and now are working on opening a second seed library in the Frehner Natural History Museum which will hopefully open at the beginning of 2024.

What are Seed Libraries?

Seed Libraries are collections of free seeds for anyone to take or donate to. The seeds are meant to be "returned" by bringing back seeds from the plants that you grow with the original seed from the library. This in turn creates more plant diversity and plants that are more adapted to our Cedar City Climate to make them more fruitful, resilient, and help flowers, produce, and more to grow like weeds.