“First-year crops don’t usually turn out well.”

Rev. Megan Davidson says this simple phrase to explain why giving out carrots from the TCU Wesley Foundation Community Garden as a prize for creating a sculpture probably wouldn’t work.

The idea is fun, and that’s okay to Davidson, the director of the TCU Wesley Foundation, a campus ministry at TCU of the United Methodist Church. Their building is located on West Lowden St., diagonal from Smith Entrepreneurs Hall.

Right now they can dream big, but by August, Davidson and her small committee of TCU students, faculty and staff say they hope to start turning the plain plot of land around the Wesley Foundation building into a community garden that everyone at TCU can learn from and enjoy.

In the Garden

Multi-level, spiral sections that looks like sunflowers, which trees are native and will be the most sustainable, how to run the pump that sends hundreds of gallons of water to the plants; nothing is really finalized yet for the 3,100-square foot plot that is the “1st phase”.

Megan’s intricate design was a dream that is slowly becoming reality thanks to her committee and her friends at Tarrant Area Food Bank, who have already set up a few community gardens in Fort Worth.

The current design is preliminary, and they have already begun to revise it for the next meeting.

Planting Seeds

Right now, the committee members are simply sifting through the seeds of ideas.

Giving away carrots for consolation is probably one they won’t plant.

Making the garden handicap accessible is one they believe will flourish.

One by one, each member’s dream of what the garden could or should be is considered.

For a group of people that don’t even have an official name and joke in their meetings about whether or not the garden’s Twitter will speak in the first person, the ideas – the seeds – are being planted.

Davidson said the first work date will be in late August, when students can volunteer to start planting the real seeds that will eventually become the garden.

A First-Year Crop

Head football coach Gary Patterson went 6-6 his first year. Sometimes things just take a little time to develop.

With a $1,500 budget until December and limited resources until students come back in August, it would be hard to see Market Square cancelling any orders in favor of the garden’s produce.

Although they have the help of people who have done this before, the main focus of the garden isn’t to grow produce.

It is, as they said in their meeting, to grow people and create community.

Not just to teach them how to garden, but to instill roots of the peaceful nature of gardens and the spirituality aspects the committee is adding to the plans, Davidson said.

Who knows? The garden may immediately be a place full of fresh produce and people looking for ways to sustain the garden and themselves.

Maybe it will be a work in progress that yields just a few okra and an onion in its first growing season.

Either way, they say they are happy if it looks better than the dull grass of the mundane block catty-corner from Smith Hall.

Sustainability

Only time can tell what will become of the garden.

The committee is dreaming freely about what it will become, and the best ideas from those meetings, the fertile seeds of their labor, will be planted soon.

The TCU community gets the chance to help and watch it grow.

While the entire campus is purple, a small corner across the street is getting a little green.