The Green Review

University communities are essential in the effort to build a more sustainable future. As UNB works towards its climate action and sustainability goals, UNB Sustainability is happy to highlight UNB community members who are making a difference on campus as “Green Champions”.

Our Green Champions of March 2025 is the Hydroponics Club

The Hydroponics Club is a Department of Forestry and Environmental Management (FOREM) initiative that started in 2019 and gained momentum again in 2023 with a few keen and dedicated members.

The club is located in the greenhouse of the new forestry building, and we have made steps toward meeting our objectives (and having fun) for the last 2 school years. We are a hands-on club that encourages the engagement of students to cultivate camaraderie within the faculty and to work together towards the common goal of food security and sustainability for students.

This year, a big goal was to advertise and get interest from lower years in the faculty, to ensure the continuation of our initiative. We grow a wide variety of produce: tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, beans, basil, thyme, rosemary, chives, kale, and we continue to experiment with new things every day!

A staff basket and donation initiative has also started this year to help finance seeds, fertilizer, and maintenance costs. We hope that these monthly baskets will become available to students once we can ensure a consistent flow of produce. With our expanding system, we hope to provide bushels of fresh produce with "pay what you can" pricing in the near future. This will give students low-cost fresh food throughout the winter.

Having locally grown food available on campus will help students reduce their carbon footprints while supporting a student-run group. The members of the Hydroponics Club want to create a positive impact on the university and provide locally sourced food to give back to our little community. It has also had a positive impact on the school experience of our team, who find gardening therapeutic and a nice break in the workday.

Photo from left to right: Kieran (4th year Forestry), Mateo (3rd year Forestry), Alex (4th year Environmental Management), Helen (4th year Wildlife Management), Liz (4th year Forestry), and Riley (4th year Forestry).

We have all been hard at work this school year to introduce new elements to our little club, such as vermicompost to manage compost in the faculty, a large soil seed bed for dirt loving veggies like onions and spinach, aerated buckets of water for large-rooted plants, and a new hydroponics system that has doubled production!

Keep an eye out for our end of semester booth that will be outside the science library early April, we will be selling seed packets and harvesting the last of the produce!

Know someone who should be a Green Champion? Let us know by emailing sustain@unb.ca.