COURTESY DAISY FYNEWEVER | The Hoya Harvest Festival, organized by the Earth Commons, celebrated the Hoya Harvest Garden and sustainability at Georgetown on Oct. 18.
The Hoya Harvest Festival, an annual event organized by the Earth Commons to celebrate environmental and sustainability initiatives at Georgetown, brought community members together at the Regents Hall patio Oct. 18.
Launched in spring 2023, the Hoya Harvest Garden is one of the Earth Commons’ key initiatives, serving as a “living laboratory” for agricultural practices that have proven promising in building more resilient food systems.
Food production, which requires fertilizers, pesticides and agricultural land and water use, is an environmentally-costly process. Overall, processes like distribution, packaging, refrigeration and waste management are responsible for one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The Hoya Harvest Garden aims to approach food cultivation through a sustainable lens.
In his opening remarks, Peter Marra, founding director of the Earth Commons and Laudato Si’ professor of biology and the environment, emphasized that the Hoya Harvest Garden serves multiple purposes.
“It’s not just food that we’re cultivating,” Marra said at the event. “We’re nurturing people, plants and communities. We’re providing solutions to the broader community.”
The festival was a prime opportunity for students to engage with the Hoya Harvest Garden through harvesting produce, including okra, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and microgreens — vegetables that are still in the sprout stage and have shown potential as nutrient-packed health boosters. Attendees could take the produce home after it was weighed.
Meredith Beyer (SFS ’26), a festival attendee, said the experience made her more aware of the food production process, which aligned with the organizers’ goals for the event.
“I think it gives students more of an appreciation and keeps them from being desensitized — when they go to the grocery store and take for granted getting fresh fruits and vegetables that easily,” Beyer told The Hoya. “I feel like it’s a really good process to go through, seeing just how many steps and people it takes to build a garden.”
According to Daisy Fynewever (CAS ‘26), a student steward who assists with the garden’s management, the garden has produced over 26,000 servings of vegetables — most of which are donated to the Hoya Hub food pantry, a resource to combat food insecurity in the Georgetown community. Other destinations for the produce include the Leo J. O’Donovan dining hall and the Father McKenna Center, a partner organization of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching & Service (CSJ) that supports people experiencing homelessness and runs a food pantry for families living in Washington, D.C.
“We want to partner with existing efforts in D.C. and build a curriculum around this to teach, in experiential ways, concepts of food justice while providing access to sustainable food to everyone in urban centers,” Marra wrote to The Hoya.
The festival, beyond being a place for students to engage with the garden’s work, was also a colorful affair that attracted passersby with its music, fall-themed activities and hors d’oeuvres including corn on the cob, apple cider, a chocolate fountain and fresh fruits and vegetables. The programming included an a cappella performance by the Georgetown Phantoms, representatives from student organizations such as the Georgetown Renewable Energy and Environmental Network (GREEN) and stations where attendees could make a lavender body scrub in a jar, paint pots or carve pumpkins for a contest.
The festival fell during Family Weekend this year, so attendance was high and people beyond the immediate Georgetown community had the chance to learn about the work of these organizations and the Earth Commons.
Some sustainability solutions used by the garden include drip irrigation, crop rotation and design choices such as filling the garden’s borders with flowering plants to create hospitable habitats for pollinators. Another design element is the garden’s paths made of wood chips to prevent walking on the soil. Foot traffic can cause compaction when soil particles are pressed together, resulting in smaller pore spaces and slower water and gas exchange for the growing plants.
Fynewever highlighted the communal nature of the Hoya Harvest Garden and its multifaceted goals, being both a green initiative and an educational tool.
“I’ve been really happy to see how much bigger it’s gotten, because it was only started in 2023, and since then it has grown exponentially, both in the amount of food that it produces and the amount of land that it covers,” Fynewever told The Hoya. “I think it’s a way that students can learn about wider food systems and in that way remove themselves from the Georgetown bubble because they’re thinking more about how our food production interacts with our community, both ecologically but also in a human sense.”
Marra urged those present at the event to take the next step of getting involved — whether with the Earth Commons or in another capacity that contributes to our shared stewardship of the Earth.
“Be part of the solution,” Marra said. “Be part of the growing effort.”
He also emphasized his gratitude for the faculty, staff, students and community members who organized the Hoya Harvest Festival, as well as those working year-round to propel the Earth Commons’ initiatives forward.
“It’s amazing how this simple act of creating a garden here has created so much more, and we’re just so thankful for it all,” Marra said.