Overview

Students picking items from the garden.

The 40 x 40 ft. campus garden is designed to help students to learn to eat healthier, save money, and begin to connect the foods they eat with where they come from. This project will demonstrate what it takes to plant, grow, harvest, and safely store foods for future use.

Please fill out our Harvest Form after your garden visit.

Student Rules of Engagement

With over 600 students on campus, our community will need to share the garden’s resources—like a family. To share in the bounty, please follow our six Student Rules of Engagement, adapted in part from a Native American code of conduct.

Student picking beans in the garden.
  1. Take only what you need. Limit your harvest to one plastic bag per week. Don’t pick all the veggies available. If you are picking beans, only pick half the plants or one side of the bean poles.
  2. Share what you take. If you are making a salad, consider making one for your friend!
  3. Replace what you take. It takes a team of volunteers working year-round to make the garden productive. Consider contributing to a garden initiative, such as plant removal and composting (October), leaf raking (November), starting seedlings (Spring Break), and prepping the beds for planting (March through May).
  4. NEVER step on the raised beds. The purpose of the raised beds is to provide drainage for the plants and to aerate the soil for all the good microbes that live in it. When you step on the beds, you compact the clay soil, which becomes dirt. Plants don’t grow in dirt, but they thrive in soil. Instead, use the wide walkways between the rows.
  5. NEVER harvest if the leaves are wet. The fastest way to kill a plant is to touch the leaves when they are wet. That is how diseases are spread. The morning dew or a few hours after a rain are the worst time to go into a garden. If you want to spend some quality time there, feel free to pull weeds in the walkways or around the fence line, or just watch the bees and butterflies do their pollination magic.
  6. Close the gate when you leave. Help us keep deer and other pests out of the garden.