HUNNICUTT FOOD FOREST · STUDENTS FOR STEWARDSHIP · CLEMSON, SC
What's growing at Clemson?
A food forest, for starters — planted at the headwaters of Hunnicutt Creek by students who believe you can feed a community and heal a watershed at the same time. Come see. Better yet, come dig.
WHO WE ARE
Just students, learning from mentors
We're a student club at Clemson that has already outlived a complete turnover — the founding crew moved on, and the food forest kept right on growing. That's the thing about planting something real: it makes the club bigger than any one of us.
And this last year has been the best one yet. We work side by side with the Agronomy Club, the Biosystems Engineering department has been behind us the whole way, and everywhere we turn there's a new partnership ready to form — from the campus greenhouses to the restoration agriculture farm down at the Clemson bottoms. People from every background and belief show up, work next to each other, and leave with dirt on their boots and new friends.
That's the whole secret. Stewardship is something nearly everyone can get behind — and college is for making memories. We'd love for you to join us as we cultivate Clemson.
START HERE
Your first workday is the easy part
Stewardship Sundays run nearly every week — show up, grab gloves, and someone will hand you something alive to put in the ground. Every semester we throw Cultivate Clemson, our open festival at the food forest with partners from across the Upstate. No dues, no experience needed, no commitment. Just come once.
HOW WE THINK
Be the positive feedback loop
Here's what we've seen firsthand at the food forest: a degraded water system can zap the life out of a place. And the reverse is just as true — when water gets to slow down, soak in, and stay, biodiversity flourishes. Living soil holds the water. The water feeds more life. More life holds more water.
It's a positive feedback loop, and it's the most hopeful thing we know. So that's what we're trying to be at Clemson: the positive feedback loop of biodiversity. Every swale we dig, every root we sink, every person who joins a workday makes the loop stronger.
The loop gets stronger every time someone joins it.
ON THE GROUND
What that looks like at Hunnicutt
The food forest is the thesis with its sleeves rolled up: grow real food and rebuild a living system, on the same ground, at the same time. Native, edible, medicinal, pollinator-friendly — every plant earns its place twice.
🗺️ On the Site (From the 2025 Plan)
- Fig Trees — roadside zone along Old Greenville Hwy frontage
- Chickasaw Plum — native, early spring food source for pollinators
- American Persimmon — native, high wildlife value, drought-tolerant
- Crepe Myrtles — existing grouping used to anchor the west zone
- Piedmont Prairie — native grass and wildflower meadow area
- Herb Spiral — keystone feature, multiple microclimates in one structure
- Woodchip Path — main visitor circulation through the food forest
- Hunnicutt Creek Reach 1 — the creek itself, at the base of the site
🌿 Pillars of Planting
Every species we choose is evaluated against four criteria:
- Native — supports local food webs and wildlife relationships
- Edible — contributes to actual food production for the community
- Medicinal — practical value beyond aesthetics
- Pollinator-Friendly — feeds the insects that feed everything else
🌾 Agronomy Club Plant List (Carson Wargo)
Prioritized species for Piedmont SC conditions and greenhouse propagation. Bold = highest success rate.
- Trees: Black willow, Boxelder maple, Redbud, White oak, Cedar, Persimmon
- Shrubs: Elderberry, Red twig dogwood, Chokeberry, Beautyberry, Buttonbush
- Flowers: Blazing star, Butterfly milkweed, Common milkweed, Swamp milkweed, Black-eyed Susan, Purple coneflower, Plains coreopsis, Anise hyssop, Yarrow, Blanketflower, Bee balm, Goldenrod, Bergamot, Zinnias, Cosmos, Annual sunflower, Maximillian sunflower
- Grasses: Little bluestem, Indian grass
🧪 Spring 2026 Workplan Highlights
- Roadside tree line pilot — 1,000 linear feet of Newman Rd frontage
- Fig propagation workshop (Feb–Mar)
- Purple Martin birdhouse build + bench install
- Annuals + medicinals plan with SCNPS sale (March–April)
- Control burn planning for Experimental Forest zones
- Cultivate Clemson grand opening — late April 2026
What We're Really After
Feed People · Heal the Watershed · Bring People In
Everything we plant or build comes back to three things.
Feed people
A public, edible, medicinal landscape anyone can learn from and eat from — native, edible, and pollinator-friendly species chosen to actually produce food, not just decorate.
Heal the watershed
Slow the water, cool the soil, and rebuild the living sponge at the headwaters — biofilters, natural pools, deep roots, and fungi that improve water quality in Hunnicutt Creek and restart the biotic pump.
Bring people in
Build it shoulder-to-shoulder with clubs, neighbors, and partners — a third place where stewardship is something you practice alongside other people, not a thing you only read about.
THE LIVING MAP
This place has a pulse
The food forest keeps its own living record — a satellite map the club pins plantings, problems, and art onto, a library of every plant we've put in the ground, and a nursery ledger of what's coming next. It updates because we're out there, not because someone wrote a press release.
LIVE MAP
🗺️ The Living Map
Satellite view of Hunnicutt — every planting, problem, and piece of art the club has pinned, as it happens.
FIELD GUIDE
🌿 The Plant Library
Every species we've put in the ground, cataloged and searchable — the field guide to what's actually growing.
THE KIOSK
🪧 The Trailhead
The cork board, the calendar, and the nursery ledger — one sign post for everything the club's up to.
BIGGER THAN US
Different continents, same loop
In the Sahel, the Great Green Wall stretches across eleven nations — communities holding the front line with food forests and tree nurseries. In India, teams reshaped whole valleys so monsoon rain would slow, spread, and sink; wells refilled, and families stayed. Different continents, different cultures, same loop: when we design for water, biodiversity follows. When biodiversity thrives, water sticks around.
What heals a region is the same thing that healed a quarter-acre at Clemson. The scale changes. The relationship doesn't.
OUR STORY
Humble beginnings
We petitioned for a neglected patch of campus, and we got it. Our first summer brought a brutal drought that taught us more than any classroom could — and we answered it with swales, Zuni waffle gardens, and every rain-harvesting idea we could find. The ground held. The club has since survived a full changing of the guard, and the dream that started it all still stands: stream restoration through watershed-scale stewardship — clean water and healthy habitats, starting right here.
… the long version, for the porch-sitters →
SUMMER 2024
Three peach trees
South Carolina baked that summer under a drought so deep that rivers turned to memory and the ground split open like worn, calloused hands. At our new food forest, the insects went quiet. The birdsong stopped. We'd just planted three peach trees on our hillside, and we were about to get an education.
Tree one stood at the top of the hill. The drought had the high ground, and he was the first to fall. Tree two held on while the silence in the soil crept downhill. Tree three was our underdog — the last holdout at the bottom of the slope, closest to the creek. Two of us spent the summer hauling five-gallon buckets up from that creek to keep him alive. It was like trying to put out a house fire with a teacup.
That's when it clicked: drought isn't just dryness. It's the loss of resilience — the loss of life's ability to buffer the unexpected. When the soil goes silent, everything gets fragile. The trees, the insects, the birds. Even us.
THE NEXT SPRING
Then we learned to partner with water
We stopped trying to rescue plants one bucket at a time and started asking why the land couldn't hold water on its own. The answer changed how we work. We shaped the ground to slow rain down and let it sink. We covered bare soil. We planted roots that feed the microbes that feed everything else.
The next year, more saplings went in the ground — and they held. Yes, the summer was gentler. But that's only part of the story. Water stays with us longer now. The plants feed the microbes, the microbes feed the roots, and every layer of the web gains a little more footing. That's what stewardship buys: not a guarantee, but resilience.
THE ONES WHO SHOWED UP
Nobody does this alone
The first time we needed help, the Upstate answered. A farmer from Six Mile walked our slope and showed us how to read where water wants to go. A builder from Seneca brought a broad fork instead of a slideshow. A nonprofit in a 1913 Anderson schoolhouse showed us what it looks like to feed 75 families a week from two acres. Mentors, donors, campus crews — this place is as much theirs as ours.
Walked our slope in the first fall and led the keyline design session that still shapes how we plan the site.
Showed up with a broad fork instead of a slideshow and taught us to read the land before designing it.
Feed 75–100 families a week from two acres in a 1913 Anderson schoolhouse — proof of what soil and community can do.
Where's your square yard?
Somewhere near you, a patch of land is asking for a better conversation with water. Your balcony planter counts. The median strip outside work counts. The neglected corner of campus definitely counts — that's how this whole thing started.
You don't need a degree. You don't even need a plan. You need a Saturday and a pair of boots.
or just wander the map of what we've planted →
HOPE, WITH A SHOVEL.
Find Us
Hunnicutt Food Forest
Located on East Campus near Kite Hill, off Newman Road — at the very headwaters of Hunnicutt Creek on Clemson University's campus.
Off Newman Road, Clemson SC 29634
What We've Done
Events & Milestones
Click a semester to expand. Built from Instagram posts, newsletter issues, and site records — add yours at ace4@clemson.edu.
In the Field
Real days, real ground
No stock photos. Every image here is a day at Hunnicutt — planning, planting, propagating.
