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Thank You Jane!

by Julia St.Clair, BTLT Agricultural Programs Coordinator

Jane with a group of Common Good Garden Volunteers

As the Tom Settlemire Community Garden (TSCG) is wrapping up the 2022 growing season, we would like to take this opportunity to give a huge shout out to our summer Environmental Studies Fellow from Bowdoin College, Jane Olsen! 

Jane dug in right away, coming to the Garden with little gardening experience, but quickly learning while working alongside other gardeners in the TSCG community. Jane even had the chance to tend her own plot at TSCG, successfully growing leeks, carrots, herbs, and a seemingly endless bounty of tomatoes! Jane brought her passion for building community and love for the outdoors to TSCG.

Jane working on Orchard research with Glenn Wildes

Over the summer, Jane worked alongside volunteers in the Common Good Garden, supporting and leading weekly workdays. She also joined the volunteer team supporting the New Mainers garden at TSCG, adding an extra set of hands to support this ambitious project. Additionally, Jane spent the summer researching and chatting with local experts about orchard care, drafting up an orchard care and maintenance plan for the TSCG orchard and learning more about the history of how these blueberry bushes, peach trees, and apple trees came to grow at TSCG. 

As an avid writer, Jane tackled a personal project while working at TSCG: interviewing and profiling a handful of TSCG plot holders from new to longtime gardeners. Her articles tell the stories of garden community members and offer the advice they shared for interested gardeners. These stories put faces to some of the many plots in the garden, reminding us just how many hands go into growing TSCG. In these articles Jane also highlights many of the different growing styles and gardening knowledge backgrounds that TSCG gardeners bring to the space. You can check out her articles on the BTLT blog. 

Jane with MCHPP Fellow Liliana and BTLT intern Cora

Collaborating with a Bowdoin Fellow from Midcoast Hunger Prevention Program, Liliana, and BTLT intern Cora, Jane worked to plan and host a successful volunteer appreciation event at the Garden. The event included live music, treats from Wild Oats and Mere Point Oyster Co, and a raffle for volunteers. Jane also returned this fall to volunteer in the Common Good Garden and helped host the Garden’s annual-ish ‘Plot Luck’ event with members from across the garden community.

We are so grateful to have had Jane join us this past summer and we hope that she will continue to expand her gardening knowledge. We wish her the best of luck with her continued studies at Bowdoin and hope that she will come back to visit us at TSCG often!

BTLT In the News: “Connect to past and present at the Cathance River Nature Preserve”

The Bowdoin Orient

“Connect to past and present at the Cathance River Nature Preserve”
By Jane Olsen (The Bowdoin Orient)

A visit to the Cathance River Nature Preserve in Topsham will allow you to consider the past, the future and how to stay grounded in the present. Only a 10-minute drive from campus, the preserve features miles of riverside trails winding through growing forests. It is unlikely you will cross paths with many others.

When following the directions to the trailhead, you may be confused as to why you’re being guided through the Highlands Retirement Community. At first, I thought I was going to the wrong place because the trailhead is easy to miss and the adjacent parking lot only fits about five cars (if squeezed in at an angle to the road). But the waves of Highlands residents on their daily walks are a reminder that a sense of community extends beyond the spaces of Bowdoin’s physical campus.

The Preserve offers enough trails to explore for hours, but it is equally beautiful if you only have a few minutes to spare. This visit, I decided to walk down the staircase next to the parking lot and continue until I reached the Highland trail, passing through the vernal pools.

From this point, the path to the river is no more than 10 minutes. After a semester of shuffling my feet on the ice across campus, stepping over small patches of mud was a welcome surprise. As I moved closer to the river, an abundance of green moss on the forest floor creeped up on me.

The light flickered brighter in the areas where young saplings have yet to grow, and in areas with white pines thick with age, only a few sunbeams pass through their needles. This forest is not uniform and the path is not straight—mimicking the collision of many generations.

After scanning a QR code posted on one of the saplings, I realize that the code is one of many scattered throughout the trails of the Preserve. The codes are a part of a “Self-Guided Adventure” initiative by the Cathance River Education Alliance, a nonprofit environmental and educational organization. Walking down the trail, this network of codes invites me to pay attention to my surroundings and reminds me of the Alliance’s efforts to further community engagement.

One QR code attributes the diversity of tree ages in the forest to a scattered timeline of logging on the land, explaining that the younger saplings were planted after the most recent logging efforts in the 1990s. The history of logging in Maine seems inextricable from our natural surroundings, reminding visitors to admire and support the conservation efforts from organizations like the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust.

These woods offer physical distance from a busy life and a chance to appreciate connections across generations, whether that be ecologically or socially. When I arrive at the river, the faint sound of the gentle water and a soothing canopy of shade returns me to the present moment. As I watch the swell of the current beside me and after stepping away from a campus buzzing with youth and driving through a community of senior citizens, my sense of place is amplified.

This week, I saw the faces of my professors for the first time since arriving at Bowdoin last year. After two semesters without upperclass students on campus and the presence of Covid-19 constantly on my mind, I have longed for a sense of cross-generational cohesion in the Bowdoin community. With an ease of connection returning to campus, the links that bring us together feel stronger. The Cathance River Nature Preserve offers a chance to explore this sense of interrelation, or to simply enjoy the outdoors.