The UC Irvine Garden Project

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The UC Irvine Garden Project is creating a vibrant, coordinated garden community at UC Irvine. The project is harnessing the six UC Irvine-based community gardens as a laboratory for hands-on sustainability education, student professional development, community engagement, and research on creating sustainable communities.

View an interactive map that shows the locations of the community gardens at UCI

Initially, at the request of garden leaders, the Garden Project is helping to facilitate communication and collaboration among the four gardens to foster increased sharing of resources, labor, gardening know-how, food, and fun. In addition, the project is building linkages with the broader community involved in sustainable food production in Orange County, particularly in low-income communities. Through this engagement, the project aims not only to enrich student understanding of food sustainability and sovereignty through the lenses of social, economic and environmental justice, but also to work with faculty members to foster community engaged sustainability scholarship on these issues.

To learn more about the Garden Project, please email sustainability-center@uci.edu.

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UC Irvine Community Gardens

Leaf icon Anthill Village Community Garden

The Anthill Village Community Garden was originally established in 1985. The current garden site is located along Anteater Drive between Palo Verde Road and California Avenue on the UC Irvine campus. The garden is a maintained as a student club of ASUCI, with many community members participating. There are 99 garden plots measuring 12 by 16 feet.  Currently, more than 100 people are on the waiting list for a plot.

Leaf icon Verano Place Community Garden

The Verano Place Community Garden is maintained by graduate students. The Verano Garden is an organic garden that provides an opportunity for Verano Place residents to garden in a communal setting. It is a place to work the earth alongside fellow residents you might not otherwise meet, and to share gardening knowledge. It is also an opportunity to increase sustainability by growing food locally, and recycle garden green waste and community kitchen waste.

Leaf icon Sustainable Polyculture Project

The Sustainable Polyculture project at UCI brings together local community members, Eco-apprentices, and Agroecology researches to identify what novice growers need to design and grow sustainable polycultures for personal use. A sustainable polyculture is a mutually dependent group of perennial and self-seeding annual plants designed to thrive with little or no external inputs and provide significant amounts of human resources. The project’s demonstrations site is located at the UCI Arboretum.

Leaf icon ASUCI Garden

ASUCI Garden also known as “Arroyo Vista Garden” or “Ants in your Plants Garden” is maintained by undergraduate students as a student club. Located in the Arroyo Vista Housing Amphitheatre, just next to the Anteater Recreation Center, the garden is one large garden without individual plots. The primary goal of the garden is to provide UCI students an opportunity to learn about the food system through garden volunteering, workshops, and curriculum integration.

Leaf icon Palo Verde Organic Garden

Palo Verde Organic Garden is a community garden that is open to and run by the residents of the Palo Verde graduate housing complex. The garden is all organic—so no commercial pesticides, chemical fertilizers, or herbicides are permitted. Garden members each maintain their own plot, often with the help of a roommate, spouse, and even children. There are a total of about 30 plots of varying shapes and sizes.

Leaf icon UCI Aquaponics

UCI Aquaponics is a student-led project which features the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a balanced recirculating environment. Our primary goal is to demonstrate that aquaponics is an economically feasible and environmentally sustainable method for local food generation in Irvine, CA. UC Irvine Aquaponics is poised to provide structured, experiential learning for UCI students, as well as local elementary, middle, and high school students.