When Albert Capitos tended the field at Camden Yards,
blemishes and weeds on the baseball diamond were
unthinkable. These days, however, the former Baltimore
Orioles head groundskeeper lives happily with a stray
clover patch and the odd ant mound. In fact, Capitos, the
manager of Homewood grounds, takes a level of pride in the
natural, but tidy, look of things.
The goal of Capitos and others who look after the
campus has been to maintain the beauty and natural look of
the 130-acre campus while significantly reducing its
environmental footprint. An impetus for adopting green
practices was the Homewood master plan of 2000, a guiding
principle of which was to preserve and enhance existing
natural systems, as it was determined that the woodlands,
water quality and stream character in and around the campus
were threatened.
Since the implementation of the master plan, the
university has hired staff with formal training in
landscape architecture, turf management, propagation and
horticulture and has steadily shifted to more
environmentally friendly landscaping practices. Most
prominently, staff has significantly decreased the use of
chemical products and supplanted them with organic-based
ones, including fertilizer made from crab meal and kelp and
insecticides made from natural oils. Grounds crews also
have created several buffer areas and leaching and
infiltration areas in order to reduce runoff into nearby
streams and storm drains.
Bob Galvin, the university's landscape architect and
director of grounds operations, says that runoff has
decreased significantly since he came to Johns Hopkins six
years ago. One key factor, he says, is that many of the
bituminous walks that used to intersect campus have been
replaced with brick footpaths that sit on beds of sand,
allowing water to filter down and not run off.
"Stuff that would have gone to the storm drains, and
ultimately to the watershed and the Chesapeake Bay and
pollute, is now getting infiltrated at a greater rate than
it ever was before," he says. "And by us staying out of the
forested areas, where we historically mowed, we are
creating natural filter buffers away from the streams and
the top of the slopes."
The grounds crew has also built up organic matter
around the perimeter of the campus to provide another layer
of filtration for the runoff while at the same time
rebuilding organics in the soil.
"It is things like this that we have done over the
last four years, and continue to do, that represent a
radical change from the way it used to be. It is a
combination of a desire to aesthetically improve the campus
and the philosophy of getting more environmentally friendly
in the day-to-day maintenance of the campus," he says.
A lion's share of the credit for the greener
practices, Galvin says, has to go Larry Kilduff, executive
director of the
Facilities
Management Office, who has been instrumental in moving
away from the "mow and blow" groundskeeping approach to a
more state-of-the-art operation.
Kilduff says that while JHU seeks to improve its
practices each season, it already has made great strides in
cutting down on the amount of potentially cancer-causing
chemicals it introduces into the environment — and
not at the expense of the campus's good looks.
"From the onset, I wanted to know that as we
transition to these greener standards and practices whether
or not we could maintain the desired look of the campus,"
Kilduff says, "and I was comfortable in feeling that we
could."
Capitos, who came to Johns Hopkins in September 2003
after four years with the Orioles, currently has a
13-member grounds crew, including a turf specialist, an
agronomist and a horticulturalist. Today, his crew rarely
uses any type of fungicides and herbicides. In the place of
synthetic fertilizers, it uses turkey litter, manure,
feather and crab meal, and other organic-based products.
The crew has also adopted a less-is-more approach,
Capitos says.
"Before, we would generally use chemical pesticides
and herbicides to try to eliminate something as soon as it
popped up," Capitos says. "Now, we tolerate some of these
things, whether it be a small insect outbreak, turf damage
or cluster of weeds. We ask ourselves, Is this tolerable or
not? Will it multiply into a bigger problem, or is it just
an isolated occurrence and we can deal with it? In the
past, one bit of damage and the grounds crew would blanket
spray. Or it would be part of the routine — like
saying, It's May, better put down the fertilizer —
even if it wasn't really necessary."
Capitos says the benefits of using organic products
are cost savings and a decrease in health risks. Even
though the crew has to use more of an organic product, he
says, it's cheaper and, when used properly, lasts
longer.
The greener practices at Homewood are being duplicated
at other Hopkins campuses, in particular Johns Hopkins at
Eastern and Bayview Medical Center, Galvin says. While
grounds operations are required by federal and state laws
to utilize "best management practices," he says that Johns
Hopkins will continue to strive to far exceed government
requirements for the benefit of people and the
environment.
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