Grounds Department

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Welcome to the Grounds Department home page! We maintain the College of Charleston's campus by tending to the diverse spread of flowers, trees, shrubs, vegetable, and herb crops. With fifteen full time employees, and student workers, we have over 110 years of service experience in our department. We practice organic landscape and gardening techniques, and use integrated pest management control.  In addition to our organic mosquito repellant services, we also decorate the campus for the May and December commencement ceremonies, as well as holiday parties.

In addition to maintaining and upkeeping this beautiful urban campus, we have special composting and urban garden programs housed under our department.  These programs offer opportunity for students to get involved, helping to run our composting and urban garden programs.  We offer paid and unpaid internships, as well as for-credit opportunities.  We host workdays, workshops, events, host guest speakers, and more throughout the year.  

The Composting and Urban Gardens Mission statement:
"To empower, educate, and make accessible our composting and urban garden programs through a living and breathing outdoor classroom.  Our goal is to practice and teach a spectrum of holistic sustainable agricultural methods such as permaculture, bio-intensive methods, natural farming techniques, lunar gardening, and biodynamics to empower our community.  It is through a broad scope of holistic techniques that we offer an alternative approach that focuses on restoring the land, while reconnecting to nature and each other in an urban setting."

Education, Empowerment, and Accessibility are the three main components guiding our environmental education efforts here at the Grounds Department. Education serves as a vehicle to cultivate investment among our community through workshops, volunteer hours, internships, and partnerships with classes.   We combine lecture series, field trips, physical projects, and practicums to create a multi-disciplinary approach to learning about sustainable agriculture and urban sustainability.  After providing information and resources through a mentoring process, we encourage student leadership when co-dreaming projects and other educational and developmental ideas. 

If you are interested in getting involved, check out our "initiatives" and "how to get involved" tabs for more information!

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