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

[Brian Tremback (brian.tremback]

> What I have most appreciated about my experience is the community's
willingness to include the garden expenses in overall budget without
requiring careful calculation about what exactly is the financial payoff.

Melanie,

I don't know what your gardening expenses are, but it's likely your harvest
easily exceeds your investment. At Burlington Cohousing, where I'm the
garden manager, our community garden is similar in size to yours and
getting the work done is similar as well. Our garden budget has been $200
per year for seeds, fertilizer, and supplies. We generate our own compost
from 32 households worth of kitchen scraps and use lots of cover crops, so
we don't purchase compost. Our climate also supplies us with usually
reliable rainfall, so irrigation is only occasionally needed.

It's hard to keep track of all the lettuce, tomatoes, and kale, harvested
over many weeks. But crops like winter squash, garlic, and onions come in
all at one time and are easy to weigh. Our experience has been that the
value of just the easily-quantified crops exceeds the monetary investment
several times. Labor is a completely different story, as I'm sure you're
aware. Communities without obsessive gardeners should probably be
supporting their local farmers instead.

Brian Tremback
Burlington Cohousing
Burlington, Vermont