Photo: Karim Wadood, a senior, pulls weeds with Abby Wallace, a sophomore, at The George Washington University’s GroW Garden. (Photo by Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
University students root themselves in the larger world
On Wednesday afternoon, when the city felt trapped inside a soup cauldron, Yvana Petros, 21, crouched alongside H Street NW and dug her fingers into a patch of soil.
She and twenty or so other George Washington University students had braved the heat to enter a space many of their fellow students might walk by a thousand times without noticing: a half-block strip of cultivated land tucked into the most urban of campuses.
There, if they were to step from the sidewalk over a shin-high wooden fence, they would enter a wonderland of tiny, lovingly tended crops: shishito peppers, kale, swiss chard, bell peppers, jalapenos, tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant, amarynth. Apples, peaches, pears. Parsley, cilantro, red okra, zucchini. Sunflowers. And a majestic fig tree heavy with soon-to-ripen fruit.
“I spent the summer working in banking,” said Petros, a senior international affairs and economics major who grew up in Ohio in an agricultural setting. Upon resuming classes last month she decided to volunteer in the university’s GroW Garden, which brought her to planting Bull’s Blood beets in Foggy Bottom. READ MORE
Tara Bahrampour
September 1, 2018
www.washingtonpost.com
