This paper presents an institutional experience of creating and maintaining thriving university community food gardens as spaces for multidisciplinary project-based pedagogy. We present best practices for a programmatic sustainability innovation that engages the educational institution, the wider community, and advances progress on key ecosocial issues. In presenting both personal and institutional outcomes as interdisciplinary campus garden founders and teachers, we share our lessons learned, and suggest approaches for starting or enhancing community food gardens on college and university campuses in ways that engage diverse audiences in critical sustainability issues with experiential hands-on learning. 

This session will give participants a “how-to” and “how-not-to” primer on launching a campus project of this magnitude.  The paper begins with a case study history of how faculty, students, and staff at one state flagship university connected both naïve and strategic efforts to gain support and space to create gardens on campus. Further, we illustrate how permissions to plant were grown into “living learning laboratories” where multidisciplinary courses across campus engage the campus gardens and local organic farms. Garden-based courses – from Art to Communication to Anthropology to Nutrition – have collaboratively and experientially taught about local food systems, growing food sustainably, the cultural histories of agriculture, health, environmental & social justice, and the global and climactic impacts of industrial agriculture.  We discuss the benefits to students, faculty, and staff; benefits to the institution itself in public recognition; the community engagement and networks generated; the empowerment of students/faculty/staff/alumni; and the other holistic benefits of having on-campus community gardens.  We also present various challenges that arise in generating and sustaining collaborative and interdisciplinary campus gardens, and provide suggestions to those who wish to start or enhance the impact of food gardens at their institutions.