Learning Gardens
Learning Garden
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We are pleased to have 5 Learning Gardens across PCC that are fully operational and producing wonderful food while providing educational resources for our students, staff, and faculty. We’re really excited that we’ve also broken ground on the 5th learning garden which is the Cascade Urban Learning Garden at PCC Cascade Campus.
The first of our gardens was created in 2009 at the Sylvania Campus. Various academic classes and the Environmental Center worked together to create the Learning Garden, which provides a place where students apply what they are learning in class to real life applications. It’s located West of Parking Lots 13 & 14 and now features a beautiful cob oven, honey and mason bees, a hoop house, a cob storage shed, and cob sitting area with canopy. To take a walk back in time, you can follow this link to an article shortly after the garden sprouted! Sylvania’s learning gardens kick-start recycling efforts
Our biggest achievement is perhaps the massive Learning Garden at Rock Creek! It’s hard to even begin to list all the wonderful things going on there. It also has the both honey and mason bees (among many other wonderful pollinators) and this has helped to make Portland Community College a Bee Campus USA certified school! There really is so much going on at this campus that is worth checking out, not to mention the Portlandia Farmstandia where the wonderful produce that is grown there is sold to the community. It even accepts SNAP benefits! You can also volunteer at all of these gardens and receive a bounty of goodness in exchange for your efforts.
There is so much to share about these learning gardens! Thankfully, there is a wonderful new district wide learning garden newsletter that will keep folks up to date on what is going on across the district.
Southeast Campus and Newberg Center were the gardens that came next and each of them continues to become more beautiful and inviting spaces at our different locations. And as of September of 2018, the Cascade Urban Learning Garden has officially broken ground! Be on the lookout for updates from that garden as it begins to take shape over the fall.