One of the great “green” minds behind organic farming and college gardens in San Diego is Paul Maschka, a longtime resident of Ocean Beach. Maschka’s hands-on ability to grow healthy soil plays a crucial role in the development of the San Diego City College Urban Farm this last summer, as well as Mesa College’s new Organic Culinary Garden. His areas of expertise include biointensive gardening, sustainable landscaping, beekeeping and permaculture, which he will be teaching about in the next few months for the San Diego Natural History Museum. Maschka was excited about working on the City College farm because funding was built into the program. “I’ve been working on school gardens for years, but without funding they slowly fade,” he said. The college pays for part-time farm helpers and student interns who manage the farm. The college garden is located in a high-traffic zone on campus where lush rose bushes once grew. “Jaws drop,” he said. “This is a farm in the middle of skyscrapers.” By transforming the heavily watered rose bush landscape, the school now uses less than an eighth of the water it used before, he said. The farm is not a monoculture crop of rows of corn, like many think of when they hear the word “farm.” Rather, the farm is an example of polyculture with meandering pathways of different shapes and sizes of plant beds growing both edible and ornate plants. The large patch of amaranth, in its bold swath of purplish red, is often the big color draw of passersby. “I wanted to have them (students and faculty) walk by and stop them in their tracks,” he said of the farm design. The creative design has been a success, and yields a bounty of vegetables each season. Currently growing are: broccoli, Asian greens, rutabagas, baby greens and “a tapestry of colors and textures,” according to Maschka. Luckily, Southern California has basically two seasons — warm and cool— so harvesting produce is possible year-round, he said. In the summer, the farm grows much of the standard fare, including tomatoes, squash, corn and cucumbers. During the school year, the college recently started a weekly farmers market on campus that sells the farm’s produce to mostly faculty and students, with long lines forming for the fresh, organic produce. Maschka is passionate about healthy soil and growing organically. He is a prominent member of the San Diego Food Not Lawns organization and president of the Mycological Society (study of mushrooms). “We’re not told how our food is produced, and if most people knew how our food is factory farmed, they would be horrified,” he said. He works to educate students and adults about the need to grow food organically rather than use the high levels of petroleum-based fertilizers used in conventional agriculture. As a San Diego native who grew up in Escondido, Maschka was raised on his family’s farm in an area that was once rural and full of dairy farms. Not anymore, he said. “They have slowly disappeared by strip malls,” he said. Although he grew up gardening with his parents, he hated it, he said, until later in life. Now he can’t get enough of digging in the soil, planting and enjoying the seeds of his labor. After owning a landscaping business for 15 years that he turned organic and working in horticulture at the Wild Animal Park and San Diego Zoo, he learned that he enjoyed educating people about alternative methods. He teaches about organic being good for more than food — even flowers. Synthetic fertilizers made of petroleum kill the soil, which, in turn, pollutes the watershed and our ocean, he says. “We’re stuck on a huge treadmill. We’re so addicted to the use of petroleum products,” he said. He said he is taking a stand against this vicious cycle and wants to show people how to help their environment through healthy agriculture instead of hurting it. “We need to breathe life back into the soil,” he said.