If you’re here, you love sustainability. This means you want to eat local and reduce the amount of waste you produce. Great! But you’re here, which means you also love the University of Maryland. This means you probably live in a dorm or an apartment in order to be as close as possible to your high quality education and your favorite campus community. Not so great, when it comes to sustainable food. BonAppeTERP is here to help! Buckle up and get ready to learn about all the awesome things you can do in your tiny dorm room or apartment that will go a long way towards delicious local food consumption and waste reduction!
If you live in a dorm, you are currently denied the wonderful pleasures of cooking your own delicious food. (Or spared the hassle, depending on which way you look at it). But, you have easy access to one of the most comprehensive university dining services composting systems around. The North and South Campus Dining Halls and Stamp Student Union offer numerous composting receptacles, right in the dining rooms. Even better, all kitchens also participate in composting! All you have to do is put your food scraps and soiled paper into the GREEN bins marked “compost.” A general rule for composting is “anything that was once alive” can be composted. Check out this link for more information on composting at UMD!
Dorm rooms can feel a little depressing sometimes (maybe because they lack a kitchen?). When you’re not composting your heart out in the dining hall or studying your brain out in the library, who says you can’t garden your way to happiness right in your dorm room? Having small plants on your windowsill is an awesome way to breathe light and life into your small space. Guess what else- plants are also food! Grow mint and make your own mint tea, or grow cilantro to add to your guacamole from the Diner’s Late-Night nachos! Click here to find out how to make a two-liter soda bottle into a potted plant (wow, now we’re reusing plastic too! Does life get any better??)
If you live in an apartment, congrats on being either an upperclassman or a real live adult. You rock. Now, the time has come to grocery shop for yourself: this involves superhuman ability to remember everything you need, not spend all day at the store, and try to remain within your budget. (I’m not even going to get started on cooking for yourself.) How many times have you bought a $3 bundle of a certain herb, only to use approximately one tenth of it and have the rest rot and get thrown out? (For me, in the 1.5 months I’ve lived in an apartment: 4 times. Whoops.) It may be time to consider your own mini, indoor herb garden! Just like windowsill plants for dorm rooms, herb plants can brighten your space and be used as food (saving you money!). Having herb plants in your kitchen makes them easily accessible for cooking and reduces waste, since you use them as you need them. See this link for the ten best herb plants to grow in your apartment. Highlights: basil for your pasta, and minced sage on top of pizza! (Yeah, college food!)
Herb gardens are awesome, but vegetable gardens are even more so. A project called Nourishmat aims to help apartment dwellers grow their own vegetables in an astonishingly easy and accessible format. These guys are from UMD (of course- we’re the best) and is still in the works, but recently met its funding goal on Kickstarter. Check them out here.
Now that you’re an apartment gardening pro, what do you do with all those food scraps? Compost them, obviously. If you live on campus, an easy option for composting is to simply take your compost (food scraps, soiled paper) to a nearby dining hall and use the receptacles there. If not, check out your local waste management facility and see what services are available. Another cool thing to do with food scraps is to just replant them! It sounds weird, but makes an incredible amount of sense in terms of sustainability, and saving money! See this slideshow for 11 vegetables that you can literally buy, put the unused part into a pot of water and soil, watch grow, and reuse!
What are you waiting for? No more reading- you’ve got gardening to do! See you next time!
BonAppeTERP 