SALT LAKE CITY — Following the warmest Utah February on record, March brought with it one of this winter’s biggest snowstorms. Temperatures have rebounded since that storm, but gardeners throughout the state have been left in uneasy limbo.

Has planting season arrived early on the heels of a warmer-than-average winter? Or will Utah face more delayed frozen fury?

At the University of Utah Edible Campus Gardens, weighing these concerns is left almost entirely to the students running the gardens — four upper-class undergraduate students known as “garden stewards.” Among several other managerial and agricultural responsibilities, the stewards decide what, where, and perhaps most elusively, when to plant.

Garden steward Emma Wilson said the group’s gardening strategies tend to err on the side of caution. Although it seems warm enough to plant now, she said, an unexpected freeze could stunt or kill blossoming crops.

“For now, we’ve been holding off,” Wilson said. “We’re not sure if there will be another ridiculous blizzard so late in the year. … Right now there’s not too much at stake because we don’t have much planted.”

Instead, Wilson and the volunteers she marshals are celebrating the warm weather by thoroughly preparing the gardens for the upcoming growing season. Volunteer gardening sessions are held several times a week in an effort to weed, till, compost and otherwise prep the gardens to perfection.

The Edible Campus Gardens were started in 1996 by Dr. Fred Montague, a biology professor looking for a more hands-on ecological laboratory. Over the past 20 years, the gardens have continued to expand both in acreage and in presence, partnering with the Lowell S. Bennion Service Center and giving rise to the university’s Sustainability Resource Center. They are nearly exclusively student-run.

Much of the gardens’ substantial yield is sold to students at weekly on-campus farmer’s markets. What isn’t purchased by students is typically bought out by campus dining services, who regularly use campus-grown kale and basil in their recipes.

Additionally, garden volunteers are compensated with a portion of the produce they harvest — a perk that attracts an average of 50-100 regular volunteers. Involvement jumps in the summer and dips a bit in spring, said Wilson, but organizers can always count on the assistance of students.