Participate
Volunteer work sessions cover planting, watering, harvesting, composting and season extension; no experience is required.
Learning
Courses use the garden for soil, food systems, nutrition, design and community-engagement projects.
Harvest
Produce supports the campus pantry, teaching kitchens and volunteer shares according to each season’s yield.
Anyone can dig in
Volunteer work sessions cover planting, watering, harvesting, composting and season extension, and no experience or commitment is required — students drop in for an hour between classes. Tools, gloves and instruction are provided at the shed.
A classroom too
Courses in nutrition, soil science, design, business and community engagement use the garden as a site, and its produce supplies the campus food pantry first, then the teaching kitchens and volunteer shares. Winter programming moves indoors to seed-starting and planning.
In and around Porter Falls
Porter Falls sits on the Porter River, and the university's oldest sustainability commitments are about water: the Millrace restoration, the rain gardens between Founders Hall and the Union, and a stormwater plan shared with the city. The campus climate goal is carbon-neutral operations, and progress is posted publicly each year rather than announced once.
The practical details
Where: Between North Campus and the Riverfront Trail. Season: Work sessions April through October. Harvest: Campus food pantry, teaching kitchens, volunteer shares. These specifics can shift from term to term, so confirm anything time-sensitive — a deadline, an appointment, an eligibility rule — before you count on it.
If you have a question
This is handled by Office of Sustainability (Founders Union, Room 015). Call (715) 555-0240 or email sustainability@uwporterfalls.edu during the fall and spring terms, or use MyPorter to send a message or book a time. If another office turns out to own the question, they will pass it along rather than send you back to the beginning.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.