Last fall, students gathered outside of Norris, equipped with hoes and shovels, ready to break into the earth. The land was set with ground cover to prep the soil through the winter, until it thawed and really became what was to be the Wild Roots garden.
Again, in the fall, the garden is a different sight, with hip-high tomato plants, heavy with fruits from the long, warm summer, bowed-over sunflowers and cucumbers surreptitiously weaving between the stems of others. But as the cooler weather begins to roll in, the garden is seeing its final days of the growing season.
“I think it was a really great first year, [it was] really beautiful to watch it grow and to be here for it,” says Thea Klein-Mayer, president of Wild Roots. “A lot of people didn’t even know it existed and are now kind of just seeing it dying and are like ‘what is this, don’t you know you needed to water it?’”
In the garden’s first year, it produced fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs, which they then donated to Sodexo to use in Norris dining. Next year, the group hopes to expand their market to the overall Evanston community.
“We are hoping to branch out and work with restaurants next year, and they have made some requests for some pretty awesome and unusual things,” Klein-Mayer says. “So on the one hand, we’ll probably be planting more of the standard stuff and some more funky things next year.”
Wild Roots’ outreach and volunteer coordinator Jackie Beard says that the garden will never totally close, but the frost will mark the end of the growing season. The next big project involves working with Norris again, to put up window farms, which are vertical hydroponic systems made out of reclaind materials, like water bottles.
“It would be really cool to demonstrate to the rest of the campus how you can do it on your own, in your home,” Beard says.
The garden, while for many people on the board of Wild Roots have a unique and nuanced mission and meaning, is a visible attempt to educate and show that students do still care about sustainable farming and where their food is coming from.