Quips & Anecdotes - ASB: Day 4

The last day of the Alternative Spring Break! We went out with a laborious bang actually, checking out a community garden and working on the campus farm again. The whole thing ended with a fun bonfire in the Duke Forest with good cheers and local beers with sausages. It felt like the end of Spring Break and was hard to believe that we actually had a few more days left. I definitely want to start reading much more about food and production now, and hopefully I will touch base with the other participants every once in a while and go on fooding adventures.

So the first place we went was SEEDS community garden. They function to provide space for the Durham community to grow, learn about, and maintain food. They've also developed programs to help inner city youth work on creating a sustainable farming career/job through their marketable crops. We helped by digging out some invasive Bermuda grass to make way for an edible flower bed. It reminded me of good ol' Key Club days. I really enjoyed doing it except for the fact that it was hitting springtime so my nose was running from potential allergies coming back.


We headed to the Duke Campus Farm after lunch to finish up some things we started the other day. I helped put up wire along the tops of the poles for the deer fence. It surprisingly took the whole time because of how many kinks were in the wire as we unraveled it. It was like a giant Slinky that kept getting tangled. Others worked on putting the fence up and some did a whole vegetable bed. I helped push the planter a few times so that was fun at least!


After it got really cold, we called it quits but still stayed outside as we headed to the bonfire site. It was a pavilion area in the Duke Forest where we started a fire and ate a lot of chips w/salsa and hummus, baked sweet potato, and sausage from Farmhand. We also rounded up some local beers and had some apple-lemon crumble thing one of the participants made. It was a good end to the night, and I tiredly made my way to bed around 10:30pm (which is why this post is backlogged). What a wonderful start to Spring Break!