The Mount Holyoke Environment

Keeping Mount Holyoke's Grounds Immaculate

 

Mount Holyoke's rolling greens, elegant trees, and winding paths make up a non-exclusive good beloved by many. The grounds are maintained by a hardworking, 12-person crew at the expense of Mount Holyoke College, but are enjoyed by students, faculty, and local residents alike as the open campus allows anyone to walk though. In the warmer months, the grounds crew maintains lawns and gardens, manicures trees, and collects leaves, while during colder weather they shovel snow and salt and sand roads and paths. 

Grounds work in the spring begins with reseeding of any patchy spots on the lawns in April and fertilizing all of the lawns, using synthetic fertilizers containing nitrogen and potassium. Ron McMahon, Mount Holyoke's Grounds Supervisor, a few years ago, Mount Holyoke tried ceasing use of synthetic fertilizers, but lost a lot of grass and so decided that the usage of synthetic fertilizer was a cost they were willing to pay for the aesthetic benefit of lush green lawns. He attributes this failure to survive without fertilizer to the fact that most gross seeds sold today are engineered to be grown with fertilizer, necessitating its use and creating an almost guaranteed market for a complementary good. However, he notes that the fertilizer he uses has the added benefits of helping the grass plants overwinter and develop better root systems. Unfortunately, this does mean that the lawns are not sustainable without fertilizer.

To keep the lawns well-groomed, the grounds maintenance crew aerates them once a year and mows them on a weekly schedule. Other than that, they do not take regular care of them; they allow almost all lawns and gardens to be watered exclusively by rain. The only exceptions to this are the chapel garden, the amphitheater, the lawn of the president's house, and the lawn in front of admissions.

During the winter, the grounds crew is responsible for dealing with the ice and snow that can make the campus unsafe. Mr. McMahon estimates that the grounds crew spends an hour clearing for every inch of snow they get if it's under eight inches of snow. Much more than that, and it takes them even longer. The variability in amount of time they must spend removing snow means that the amount staff work every year, and thus the amount that they get paid, varies from year to year. Exact expenditures also vary somewhat from yeary to year based on the types and quantities of supplies neccesitated by the weather. See a discussion of the grounds' maintenance budget HERE.

 

All of the grounds work produces a fair amount of organic waste, such as branches, leaves, and grass clippings. The branches are chipped and used as compost and mulch for campus flora, completing a nutrient cycle. However, leaves are added to the contained piles of manure and shavings from the horse stalls at the equestrian center, and then trucked away periodically. Formerly, the leaves were dumped off of Silver Street, near the Orchards Golf Club, but there were issues with the large quantities of leaves adversely affecting wetlands nearby. Ron McMahone mutters a bit about the presence of numerous wetlands around the campus; from his managerial perspective, they do nothing but hinder and complicate the operations necessary to keep the campus beautiful. However, others on campus are working tirelessly to protect and restore them in an effort to improve water quality in the lakes, which can be read about HERE.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Information from: Chris Domina and Ron McMahone at Facilities Management