A class of fourth-year Brock Kinesiology students recently got their hands dirty for the sake of the University community.

Students in KINE 4P14: Alternative Environmental Physical Activities rolled up their sleeves last week to clean up Brock’s Community Garden and prepare the green space for a planned revamp.

The course, held for the first time this fall, aims to broaden thinking around physical activity, taking students into less conventional spaces to experience the many ways physical activity can take place.

Students (from left) Marianne Legault, Ethan Kim and Sara Rohr help to clean up the Brock Community Garden.

Each week, course instructor Nathan Hall leads students with a lecture on an activity, which is immediately followed by a trip to experience it in action. Students are then asked to reflect on the activity and participate in a class debrief, where they discuss which activities may be best suited for different people.

In its most recent outing, the class headed to the Community Garden on campus to meet with John Dick, Brock’s Grounds Services Manager, and his team.

Created in 2008, the garden is located in front of Theal House near the Zone 2 parking lot. It includes 33 plots, each with a four-by-eight frame where members of the University community can grow various herbs, vegetables, flowers and fruit.

Members who have a plot already can retain it for future gardening seasons, but when plots become available, applications are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

“It has been a lot of fun to see what people have grown in the gardens,” Dick says. “It is interesting to see the garden used by the whole Brock community: researchers, students, grads, retirees, children from the day care centre, and members of the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre.”

The garden will undergo some changes before the next season, in part to ensure access to water is available for Brock’s green thumbs. The revamp will better align the plots with water access available through Theal House.

Instructor Nathan Hall (back centre) and students of KINE 4P14 help clear away fences at the Brock Community Garden.

The Grounds team also plans to introduce more frames to make the plots more defined and bring in new soil.

To ready the garden for its makeover, existing boards, nets and larger plants had to be removed — and the KINE 4P14 students were ready to help.

Hall says the time at the garden helped to open the eyes of students to a variety of physical activities that are not normally recognized as such. He hopes it will inspire the group of future physical education teachers to do more with their lesson plans.

In addition to picking up some gardening techniques through the hands-on experience, student Brendan Seaver-Sutton left with a rewarding feeling, knowing he was helping the Brock and gardening community through his efforts.

Student Noah Nadon says the experience made him reflect on the connections and relationships built at the garden, with people coming together from different backgrounds for a similar cause. It also caused him to think about the positive mental health benefits gardening can provide.

After a successful experience, Hall hopes to bring his class back to the Community Garden next year. He’s also looking for ways to add on to the experience by introducing initiatives such as seed harvesting to support Brock’s Seed Library.

Next week, the class will be learning about bird watching.

NOTE: This article was written in conjunction with Kassie Burns, a master’s student and research assistant on the Brock University Project Charter.