Nic Tedesco of Groton tends his 91-year-old grandmother’s garden, and Jennifer Messevy takes care of about 200 square feet of vegetable plants at her yard in Salem, but both still find time to weed and water some plots a dozen or so miles from their homes.

“We love it,” Messevy said one morning last week, as she and Tedesco worked in seven raised beds on the campus of Three Rivers Community College in Norwich.

This spring, the two environmental engineering technology students joined about 18 others in the Three Rivers United Environmentalists club in planting tomatoes, peppers, beans, Swiss chard, kale, zucchini, cucumbers and other vegetables, all agreeing to keep the beds watered and the produce picked through the summer months. The vegetables will be donated to a Gemma E. Moran United Way/Labor Food Center mobile food pantry that visits the college campus and provides food to needy students and local residents.

“We wanted to give them fresh options, versus macaroni and cheese from a box or a bag of ramen noodles,” Messevy said. “All of us think this is so important.

Diba Khan-Bureau, program coordinator of the environmental engineering technology program at Three Rivers, said the vegetable garden and a nearby 700-foot rain garden are the result of a joint project with Connecticut NOFA – the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut — and the University of Connecticut’s NEMO (Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials) program. A grant from Connecticut Sea Grant, based at UConn’s Avery Point campus in Groton, and the Long Island Sound Study helped pay for the materials.

“This is helping protect Long Island Sound,” she said of the rain garden, which helps filter 250,000 gallons of stormwater per year from the college’s parking lot and roofs.

The soils, gravel and dozens of native shrubs and flowers in the rain garden, chosen to attract butterflies and birds and survive on natural rainfall, help capture stormwater and pollutants in runoff, she explained. For the next phase of the project, her plan is to create a nature trail through a woodland buffer around the campus that will take walkers past the rain garden and the vegetable beds, where educational signs will tell about the projects.

“It’s a community outreach project,” Khan-Bureau said. “We’re modeling what others can do to reduce stormwater and nonpoint source pollution.”

Tedesco, who hopes to apply his education to a public policy career, said the project has taught him about working with the bureaucracies of the college, the regional food bank and other groups, while bringing students together around a common purpose.

“It’s nice to have a sense of community,” he said.

j.benson@theday.com

Twitter: @BensonJudy