CLAREMONT : Plot Thickens on Pitzer College Semester Project

Nearly 200 faculty, staff and student volunteers have helped create a community garden at Pitzer College in a semester project on incorporating social responsibility into the curriculum and campus life.

Volunteers created the Farm Project by tearing up an 18,000-square-foot asphalt parking lot. College Arboretum Director John Rodman and his environmental studies class are overseeing the community garden.

The project includes community garden plots for individual students, faculty and staff. It also includes an experimental garden, in which a variety of seeds, soil, irrigation and pest-control methods will be tested. Plans also call for the reintroduction of genetic strains of cultivated and wild plants that have fallen into disuse; students have already grown Papago onions and Mexican wild tomatoes in a test plot.