Organic: The old college try

Nicole Selby vividly remembers the first time she saw the fuzzy yellow larvae of the Mexican bean beetle, a sight that would send most folks screaming to the sidelines.

"It was so interesting," she says, eyes wide.

No wonder, then, that this urban-farmer-turned-lawn-alchemist can't wait to show off some fungi and nematodes "rockin' and rollin' " under a microscope. They live in Selby's compost, a key ingredient in the organic experiment she's conducting on the lawn at Swarthmore College.

For the last year, Selby has been putting down that campus-generated nutrient-rich compost; spraying its microbe-rich liquid counterpart, compost tea; aerating or making small holes in the lawn to let it breathe, and planting vigorous new grass seed, as needed, on five acres of the 25-acre rolling landscape in front of Parrish Hall, the college's signature building.

The Ultimate Frisbee team practices on this lawn. Students cross it with varying degrees of speed and intensity on their way to the dining hall. And from the bottom of the hill, this is the postcard view of what originally was called College Hall.

Later named for Edward Parrish, Swarthmore's first president, it now houses administrative offices, the student newspaper, the campus post office, and dorm rooms.

In other words, Selby's experiment has nowhere to hide, which explains why people are forever asking, "Is your experiment working?"

Her truthful, if uneasy, response: "I don't know."

The 2011 growing season has been extreme - hot and dry, then wet and wetter - making it difficult to know. At the moment, the conventional and organic lawns all look the same - green.

Selby, 31, a Swarthmore alum and full-time campus gardener since 2006, is eager to know, too: "Will the organic lawn live up to the beautiful image of the rest of the campus?

"There has to be some allowance for the expectation of the visitor," she explains.

Jeff Jabco, Swarthmore's grounds director and horticulture coordinator, thinks another season or two will provide answers.

"We really need to see some stress, see how the organic lawn looks compared to the turf around it," he says, "but since August, all it's done is rain. Nothing's under stress."

So bring on the stress! Meanwhile, the soil is definitely healthier, "teeming with microbes," as Selby puts it, in ways lawns treated with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides cannot be.