Monday, September 29, 2008
Ask enough people why they got involved in a community garden, and one word starts to surface over and over again: “Dirt.”
Marissa Meyer, Overland Park sophomore, began volunteering with the campus garden last semester.
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Garden Party
Environmental Action to Revitalize the Heartland sponsors garden party.
“For me, it’s just fun to get out here and be outside for a while and play around in the dirt,” Meyer said.
Meyer was among about three dozen students and community members gathered in the shade of the public relations building at the edge of campus Sunday afternoon for a garden party sponsored by a group known as Environmental Action to Revitalize the Heartland. EARTH is a project of the Center for Community Outreach.
Margaret Tran, Derby junior, and Maddie Fry, Topeka senior, co-directors of the gardening project, led tours of the garden’s dozen varieties of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables, and provided materials to paint signs and rocks to adorn the garden. A half-dozen dishes were available for snacking, featuring vegetables produced by the garden. Local Burger, a Lawrence restaurant known for its organic meals and local-food ethic, produced dishes made with the garden’s ingredients.
Aaron Olsen, Overland Park senior, was one of the garden’s original founders in Fall 2005. Facilities Operations removed most of the playground equipment from the lot, which had originally been used by the Hilltop Children’s Nursery. Olsen and other volunteers dismantled the decks that had covered the area and used the wood to construct the maze of garden boxes that now cover the landscape. Students then used $500 they received from Student Senate to purchase soil for the garden, which was later fortified when Facilities Operations brought in more than a ton of mulch that was refuse from trees downed by the microburst in the spring of 2006.
When Olsen left to study abroad in the fall of 2006, the garden went unused and untended for nine months, until the EARTH project adopted the area in the fall of 2007.
“When I left, I didn’t just want to pass it on without somebody being excited about it,” Olsen said.
Rob Ryan, Shawnee senior, said he followed Olsen into the project, and has become one of the garden’s central caretakers.
“There’s a core group of five or six people who are here about six hours a week,” Ryan said. Ryan said he got involved primarily for the pleasure of it, but also for the time outdoors.
“It’s a lot of fun,” said Ryan, “and I like to get my hands dirty.”
— — Edited by Arthur Hur
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