Picture looking outside the window of Norbucks this time next year and, instead of seeing slabs of concrete, finding a budding crop of colorful fruits and vegetables. Then imagine being able to go down to Willie’s Food Court and eat what’s growing right outside. That’s the kind of sustainable Northwestern that Students for Ecological and Environmental Development envision: a farm-to-fork movement in miniature.

Along with One Book One Northwestern, SEED is sponsoring a brand new campus garden they’re calling “Wild Roots.” All students are invited to help till the soil as early as next week, just in time for Earth Day. Sam Eckland, Weinberg senior and co-chair of SEED, says the goal of the garden is to increase students’ knowledge about how food and plants are grown.

“(The campus garden) allows Northwestern students the opportunity to be active participants in knowing how their food and plants grow,” Eckland says. While it might seem a little juvenile for college students to be playing in the dirt, Eckland says it’s important to understand where your food comes from. “It’s amazing how displaced Americans are from sources of food.”

Interested? Special work days will be set for all students to come and participate in the garden’s maintenance and care. Tilling the soil will begin next week, and the first planting days are scheduled for May 13–15.

The organic goods might be given to Willie’s Food Court in Norris, SEED Secretary Thea Klein-Mayer says. The Weinberg sophomore added students who garden might be able to reap the benefits of the garden by taking food home with them, a nice change of pace from C store-bought Easy Mac. This spring is the garden’s pilot growing season, she says, and they are testing the waters for now.

This new garden is not SEED’s first attempt at organic gardening. Last spring, the Barney family, who lives in Evanston, donated their front yard for an organic garden. Though SEED was enthusiastic about that garden as well, it proved too difficult to maintain over the summer, an important part of the growing season.

SEED hopes an on-campus site that can be watered by University services will be easier to keep up. Eckland hopes that maybe if students can see the garden while they’re ordering their chai soy lattes, more people will stop and take notice. “If students see the cycle of how things are grown, they will find how much more delicious their food can really be,” Eckland says.