Image Credit: Astrid Riecken, for The Washington Post
The following story appeared in The Washington Post’s Home and Garden Section on August 7.
University of Maryland students go back to the land
As every Washington gardener knows, lettuce doesn’t do July or August here. It just turns bitter and bolts. Enter Anna Wallis, a graduate student at the University of Maryland who is testing the heat tolerance of five new varieties of romaine lettuce.
The results are promising, she says, and they raise the possibility that a lettuce crop could linger long enough in summer to coincide with the tomato harvest.
This would be a boon to the home gardeners among us, but Wallis, 25, has higher aspirations for her greens. Summer lettuce would give local farmers a greater array of produce and reduce the food miles associated with a salad green grown for the most part on the other side of the continent, in the Central Valley of California.
“I’m studying all aspects of sustainable farming,” she said.
In years past, the students of animal and plant science at Maryland’s land-grant university were from the farm themselves. After taking a degree, they would return to the family farm and raise dairy herds around Frederick or grow sweet corn and soybeans on the Eastern Shore, or produce apples in the mountains. But Wallis grew up on the edge of suburbia north of Baltimore, never lived on a farm and saw the farmland of her youth nibbled away by development.
She is of a generation of suburban kids who might not know how to operate a tractor but grew up listening to a noisy national debate over the ills of industrial agriculture, a crisis of health and obesity linked to poor diet, and a locavore movement championed by figures such as Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and Michelle Obama.
Wallis is part of a group of students at the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the College Park campus who are figuring out how to turn a belief in the principles of the local food movement — environmental sustainability, social justice, better nutrition — into tangible careers. “Organic food has become almost a holy buzzword,” said Christopher Walsh, a professor of horticulture and Wallis’s adviser. “It’s a subset of what this generation is about. I’m thrilled by it.”
