What is Up With Garden Crew?
Vivian Bryan & Cal Dooley | November 20, 2024
When Hurricane Helene hit Swannanoa on Sep. 27, the Warren Wilson College (WWC) Garden Crew launched into action -– guiding lost pigs to safety, recovering lost equipment and looking after each other. Members of the student-led crew are now looking ahead to recovery and reflecting on this semester’s events to imagine a better path forward for student leadership.
Ella Tatro, a sophomore on Garden Crew recounted her experience in the following days after the hurricane.
“It was crazy for sure, we were just trying to salvage what we could,” Tatro said. “The biggest thing for us was taking care of each other and making sure everyone was accounted for. We're very close. Everyone gathered at the cabin, and that definitely brought people together.”
With the community reeling from the disaster, the Garden Crew stepped up to do their part in keeping the campus running.
“We were able to get a fridge hooked up to our solar panels, and we did some cooking specifically for people with allergies that couldn't eat at Glad,” Tatro said.
Sophomore Vera Sole Pandolfo, a first-year Garden Crew member, describes the initial experience of being on a (WWC) working-land crew post-Hurricane Helene as “a really sweet experience, watching everyone come together to support the school.”
Damage to the garden was significant. The Swannanoa River, which flows along the edge of the garden, rose nearly 30 feet in the 24 hours after the storm, engulfing multiple beds, destroying greenhouses, washing away much of the Autumn harvest and leaving behind a thick layer of mud.
A few days before school restarted, once most students had evacuated Asheville, Garden Crew members received an email alerting them that their crew would be disbanded for the remainder of the semester.
“We were a little confused… a little frustrated,” Sole Pandolfo said. “We are a student-led crew, and none of our leaders were asked what they thought.”
The email, signed by Dave Ellum, Josh Arnold and Paul Bobbitt, stated that garden operations would be put on pause for the remainder of the semester, and students were to relocate to their choice of landscaping, farm or forestry.
Sophia Acocella, a senior crew lead for Herb Crew, expresses how they wish things were handled differently.
“A lot of the times, we can understand and see the benefits of a decision that was made, and when people were split up to different crews, a lot of the upset and the confusion about it would have been negated by just telling us what was going on,” Acocella said. “Or if a decision had already been made, being like ‘We had this conversation. This is why we made these decisions, and this is how we came to it.’”
Concerns about the communication structures between student leaders and administrators echo those raised by CORE Crew members in their strike last year. While some crew members expressed frustration at the decision, there was also an acknowledgment of the challenges in implementing student leadership in the work program.
“There's always talks of committees,” Acocella said. “I think establishing the hierarchy of what's going on, there are so many people that Garden is supposed to report to… I would love full autonomy, but I also now recognize that we don't know what's going on and leadership could be really helpful.”
The explanations given at later crew meetings involved uncertainty about the safety of working in areas potentially contaminated with flood water and the other land crew’s need for support.
“I think it's great that we're helping out the other crews because there is so much work to be done," Tatro said. “But when they disbanded us, they took the work from the garden and gave it to these already overburdened crews. We've gone to these other crews but are all also trying to schedule shifts to do the work in the garden, which puts a lot more stress on students.”
Though contaminated mud was initially a concern, Ellum announced on Nov. 4 that soil tests “indicate that for the full spectrum of potential contaminants tested (168), none were found to be detectable at any levels that exceed health risks for non-residential use.”
While crew members are now aiding other land crews in recovery, Garden members have been sure to maintain their ties as a crew.
“A lot of the crew leaders now, like on landscaping and forestry, on the farm, have designated times for people to return to the garden and do some intentional work and still connect with the space,” Acocella said. “We're still doing crew bonding things and working to repair the land.”
While the damages from the storm pose potentially significant challenges for the crew, members are eager to forge ahead in returning the garden’s capacity for food production.
“My hope for the garden is that next semester, people can come back and be on the crew,” Acocella said. “Even if it's not what we're used to and we only have the partial front beds, there will be food coming out of those beds. [We are] working on experimenting on how to try and recover. There were rumors [about Garden Crew shutting down] last year, there are rumors this year and I fear every year there may be — but we're still kicking.”
