Think about where your salad comes from — the crisp bed of greens you find in the dorm cafeteria or conveniently prepackaged at the supermarket. There’s a chance the lettuce hails from Mexico, the tomatoes were plucked in California and the carrots, quite possibly, traveled to your plate all the way from Chile.

Fourteen UW students know precisely the source of their food, and it’s as local as a piece of land bordering Fluke Hall. In an organic garden dubbed a P-Patch, they tend 10 plots of vegetables, fruits and herbs from seed to harvest.

“I’ve always loved gardening and the outdoors,” said P-Patch coordinator Joanna Wright. “I’ve always felt strongly about it being important, but I never learned how to grow my own food and didn’t really know a lot about it.”

The P-Patch, which is now run by Students Expressing Environmental Dedication (SEED), started last spring as an environmental studies capstone project and is open to all students living in the residence halls. Because students who opt to live in the dorms lack access to a vegetable garden — and therefore the opportunity to grow their own food — the P-Patch is a way to eat fresh, local and organic produce.

The “P” in the name stands for Picardo, the family that operated the first P-Patch in Wedgwood, and it’s a Seattle-specific colloquialism: Residents can sow greens in one of more than 50 locations. There is always a lengthy waiting list for a plot, though, and the UW-based P-Patch is no exception.

“I tell people it’s a privilege to have a plot,” Wright said. “There’s a high demand, so you’re lucky to get one.”

Once students acquire a plot, planting becomes a largely individual process. Wright mentioned that students are encouraged to grow whatever suits their fancy.

“I have a lot of vegetables, a lot of lettuce and salad greens, spinach, carrots, garlic, peas, tomatoes, beets and onions,” said sophomore Theresa Anderton.

The P-Patch also functions communally, with gardeners pitching in to help with weeding and composting. During winter quarter, the students built their own yard-waste compost bin.

But caring for a garden does not require too much of a time commitment.

“You probably have to do weeding every other week, and there’s always watering to do, especially when the weather’s nicer,” Anderton said. “It’s not an everyday thing, and it’s kind of nice to have some growing things.”

Andrew Parelius, a senior and chemistry major, relishes the break he’s able to take from the classroom, replacing test tubes with watering cans.

“For me, [the commitment] is pretty minimal,” Parelius said. “You have to like it. If it feels like a chore, it’s probably not the best thing.”

Both Wright and Parelius noted that most gardeners spend a couple of hours per week in the P-Patch weeding, watering and, now that spring has finally bloomed, harvesting the fruits of their labor.

“Once you pull them, you can’t put them back,” Wright joked as she yanked a beet from the soil. Fortunately, the vegetable was ready to be picked; Wright will toss it into a salad tonight when she goes home for the weekend.

That’s arguably been the greatest reward of the P-Patch: The gardeners pluck plants from their plots to cook with or oftentimes just eat the fruits and vegetables raw.

“I’ve just been noticing I’ve been eating so many more greens than I usually do because I’ve been growing them, and I have to keep up with it,” Wright said.

Wright detected a positive change in her health since beginning work at the P-Patch.

“I feel a lot healthier because of it,” she said. “The other thing is, I’ve really kind of developed a taste for it. I find myself craving it.”

The actions of the student gardeners correspond with the concept of slow food, a social movement begun to combat the world’s addiction to fast food and love affair with convenience.

“A typical meal travels, like, 1,500 miles before it reaches our dinner plate, and there’s a huge carbon footprint attached to the production and transportation,” Wright said. “It’s produced in a way not helpful to the environment, and all those pesticides are not helpful for us, either.”

The movement emphasizes pesticide-free agriculture and the appreciation of good food and community.

“It’s nice to know where the food is coming from,” Anderton said. “When you go and buy a salad in some store, you don’t know exactly where the lettuce is coming from. I like the idea of being able to grow your own food, starting from nothing — just dirt and plant a seed and get attached to it.”

Wright spoke of forging a bond with her garden, a connection not generally formed in the time it takes to grab a head of lettuce from a grocery-store aisle.

“I feel like I develop a personal relationship with my gardens and plants,” she said. “I’ve seen them go from a seed to a fully fledged plant.”

Come autumn, Wright will be moving out of the residence halls and handing her plot over to another dorm student. She will still operate as the P-Patch coordinator and has lots of ideas for next year.

In addition to expanding the garden to add six more plots and possibly an orchard, Wright seeks to convert one or two plots into a giving garden, where the produce will benefit a local food bank.

“I think it’s important to make that good-quality food accessible to people who don’t necessarily have the time or money to garden themselves,” Wright said.

Aside from the environmental and health benefits, there’s a more abstract side to gardening, Wright noted, which involves “just tuning in to the land.”

“A lot of people see a garden and just say, ‘Oh, it’s pretty,’” Wright said. “I walk into the garden with really different eyes. Nothing’s moving — it’s not some sci-fi movie or something — but there’s a lot going on.”

Reach reporter Rachel Solomon at features@dailyuw.com.