Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Questions re setting up a garden or orchard as a co-op or club

[Kay Argyle (Kay.Argyle]

We've had minor successes at sharing small enterprises, and miserable
failures. It depends greatly on the dynamics of the community and the
individuals involved.  YMMV.

Our orchard trees were purchased partly by community funds and partly by
donation. The community hired installation of an irrigation system
(programmable timer, stop-and-waste, valves, and drip lines), and pays for
the water. The work is done by whoever is willing to do it.  Or is not done.
A couple of residents have arborist training (and a few without training
_think_ they know how to prune -- shudder).  One year somebody persuaded an
arborist to hold a class on pruning (with demos and hands-on homework) in
our orchard.  Whoever wants to, picks the fruit, and the community is happy
if some cobblers show up at pot luck.  Occasionally people have passed out
jars of apple sauce or raspberry jam.

New residents sometimes get lyrical about the idea of the entire community
gardening together. I've learned to keep my mouth shut and let them figure
out the hard way why most gardeners choose to have individual veggie beds.
One group made a go of sharing. More often, one person gets exasperated that
the other never shows up to weed or water. Or neither show up, and along
about July another gardener covers over the blowing seed heads with weed
cloth.

When the community started the garden, the gardeners bought lumber for
raised beds and built them themselves, as many as each chose to build.  Over
the years, as gardeners left the community, an unused bed would be offered
to new households, until about half belonged to people who hadn't done
anything to "earn" them.  One year we had several more households who wanted
to garden than we had unclaimed beds.  The new households couldn't
understand why the entire garden wasn't strictly allotted at one bed per
household.  If there weren't enough beds, someone needed to build them one!
The suggestion they should build their own, like those gardeners who had
multiple beds had done, didn't go over well.

Several of our residents share a small flock of chickens.  Each has one or
two days a week when they let the chickens out in the morning, feed and
water, and close the coop at night.  They collect and keep that day's egg
production.  Every few weeks the club gets together and moves the coop and
fencing to a different weed patch.

I believe the buy-in is simply to purchase the next bag of chicken feed. The
chickens were left behind when someone moved; the club was given an old
coop, and the chicken run is a roll of fencing on loan from a neighbor. So
no startup costs. While there is daily work, there is also a daily (or
almost) payoff. 

The chicken club is about a year old.  It seems to be working okay.  It's
uncertain yet how they will deal with the continuing drop in egglaying, as
the hens are no longer spring chickens (so to speak):  Will they buy chicks
and somehow work up the ruthlessness to slaughter the older ladies (or bribe
a neighbor to do it)? or accept that they are running a home for retired
chickens? Or, next time someone reports seeing a raccoon, "forget" to secure
the coop, and wait until after the last old hen vanishes (not silently) in
the night, before passing the word along to our raccoon-disliking
non-cohousing neighbor with the pellet gun. And by the way, could she
increase her next order of chicks, and split the cost with them?

There are some important differences in how an orchard club would function.


While the chicken run limits other uses of an area, it doesn't take a lot of
room and never stays put very long.  Trees are very permanent.  Many fruit
trees need cross-pollination, so you can't have just one peach, one plum,
one apple.  Your community needs to be agreeable to the orchard club taking
over part of the property.  This may be a nonissue, if others approve on
principal of having an orchard (even if not personally participating) or
there is plenty enough land to meet other needs/wants.

Either plan to hire a professional arborist, or have at least a couple of
people in the club get honest-to-god training on tree pruning.  More than
just a one-hour lecture; something like an arborist certification course.
You can probably find a class locally:  continuing education at a
university, or the county agricultural extension agent (assuming your state
has such things).

Unlike keeping chickens, the costs and labor of fruit trees are frontloaded,
and the reward is years away. Fruit trees can cost anywhere from $10 to $100
each, especially if you want something besides whatever unnamed variety the
garden manager at Home Depot got a special on.  

There is the considerable work of planting the trees, the extra babying
while they get established (particularly watering, in our climate), the
pruning to ensure a good branching structure, stripping immature fruit the
first couple of years to encourage the trees to put their efforts into an
extensive root system and sturdy branches.  

Some of the people putting in money and labor may find themselves leaving
the community for a new job in Chicago, college in Vermont, a new spouse in
New Jersey, or for omigod-anywhere-but-cohousing, before they ever see a
nectarine.  New residents may want to participate.  The community and the
orchard club should figure out, now, how to handle that. 
 
Will you buy out people who are leaving, or do they forfeit their investment
to the club or the community?  
Do you ask new members to pay part of the years-ago cost of buying the
trees?  How do you "refund" people for their labor? 

Such issues of club membership might be simpler if the community pays for
the trees, and the orchard club "rents" them.

If the trees are paid for by the orchard club, do they eventually become the
community's property nonetheless?  It's easy to wind up a chicken club:
Offer a neighbor three moth-eaten hens and a half-empty bag of feed; by the
time you drag the coop across the parking lot to the dumpster, it will be
coming apart and easy to heave in.  By contrast, a fruit tree will still be
around when the twenty-something who dug its planting hole has gotten as
gnarled with age as the tree (assuming it hasn't been bulldozed and "Peach
Tree Lane" paved where it used to be). 

Kay
Wasatch Commons
Salt Lake City