For the past two weeks or so, a troupe of students has been hard at work tearing up the lawn between Olin and Boliou. It started with cutting up all the grass in a lima-bean-shaped patch of ground and hauling it away, then students hoed the earth to soften it and made paths winding between raised beds. A painted wood sign in the middle of the plot reads “Eat the Lawn.”
This new addition to the east side of campus topography is the work of Food Truth, a campus group whose goal is to raise our “food consciousness.” They plan educational campaigns about issues such as organic farming and the use of growth hormones and organized trayless Fridays in the dining halls. The idea behind “Eat the Lawn” is that there’s a better way to use open spaces than featureless expanses of turf. So the students of Food Truth have replaced a section of Olin’s lawn with a community vegetable garden that will be open to everybody on campus. If one of the future tomatoes looks particularly inviting, you are free to take it.
It took some planning to get the green light to dig up an expanse of Carleton’s grounds. “I just talked to a lot of people,” says Katie Blanchard ’10, one of Eat the Lawn’s organizers. She took her idea to President Oden and Dennis Easley, the head of grounds. The fact that she’s worked on the Farm House garden in the past was a large factor in their decision to let her go forward. “They’d seen that I took care of it, so they were cool with letting me do this.”
On Thursday afternoon of seventh week, the Food Truth workers were leveling and tamping down the earth to form the walkways. They attacked the job the old-fashioned way, with shovels, and while they worked, a spontaneous and spirited debate broke out about the costs and benefits of no-till farming.
If you were looking forward to getting your hands on some mouthwatering home-grown vegetables, you’ll have to wait until next school year, because nothing much will be coming up until June. In the fall, look forward to radishes, carrots, eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, Swiss chard, mustard greens, and all sorts of other vegetably goodies. Eat the Lawn’s current plan is for one year, but Food Truth would like to re-plant the garden next year, so we may just have a new free vegetable tradition on campus.
