Hi Sharon
I can't tell from your post if you have a communal garden or a
family-plot type garden. But we have some minimum work requirements
for our communal garden. We liken it to joining a softball team ... we
need good players all season.
Our "bare minimum" commitment is 50 hours a season, which is roughly 2
to 2.5 hours a week from April thru October, with more hours expected
at the beginning of the season and fewer hours at the end. Considering
the yield of delicious organic produce, this a very small labor
commitment.
Many gardeners put in hundreds of hourse, but 50 is the minimum, below
which the precious spot given to that household becomes a source of
resentment, since we have many eager households on the waiting list
whom we would like to invite in.
This 50 hours a season is to tend a 75' x 4' row, or 300 sf. Generally
a household is one worker and one or more eaters, so that allotment
generally represents the space requirement for one laborer.
We also require everyone to work at least one 2-hr compost party a
season in addition to their row work.
And we expect participants to work a monthly all-hands-on-deck party
where an amazing amount of work gets done. This monthly work party is
coupled with a delicious potluck. On these days we may line out tasks
that support the garden in general, such as making bridges or mowing
the perimeter. We usually get a good turnout of about half the garden
for these monthly work parties, and great food. These work hours do
count toward the total.
But we don't track hours.
Each worker reports to a team leader who manages one to three crops.
The team leader wants a good work force, and he or she helps select
his or her team for the coming year. In the past we didn't give
leaders a choice about who was on their team (or not much of a choice)
but our leaders are getting stronger and savvier. They don't want
slouches on their team, and by now (we are on our 9th year), they know
several of the slouches. So this year, the leaders will have much more
control about who is on their team.
We expect to face the dilemma of a long-time member not getting
selected by any team leader, so we are taking pains to forewarn our
community.
But the garden is unfolding in this way. While we will always welcome
past gardeners to our social events, and bring in new gardeners who
are untested and unsure of what to do, we have to also recognize the
garden has grown an increasingly committed and skilled work force,
with high crop yields in mind. That's an interesting direction for us
to go, so we will let it happen.
At the community gardens this year we'd like to help gardeners work on two
time management issues in the community garden plots.
1) Balancing time on garden tasks. One thing we have noticed is that
gardeners tend to focus on one type of task and all sorts of other things
fall by the wayside. This tends to have a negative snowball effect in that
it leads to extra work down the line for weeding along with lower yields.
We'd like to encourage doing tasks in each major category when they come to
the garden. For example during the late spring/early summer transition
phase a gardener could spend part of their time at the plot harvesting
spring vegetables, some time weeding, a chunk prepping the ground for
summer planting, and part planting summer transplants or seeds. In this way
there would be less weeding work and greater, steadier yields.
If you have thoughts about portioning out the time and tasks at different
times of the year, that would be greatly appreciated.
2)We also find that people new to gardening, especially those without
gardener relatives often are surprised at how much time gardening takes. In
the cases of some who lived in areas without gardens to walk or drive by, we
have discovered that some people think that you plant seeds and then come
back later and harvest vegetables. They are unaware of the gardener's
activities in between.
What we'd like to do here is give people some estimates for the average
number of hours per week they could expect to spend on their plot to get
reasonably good results. We'd like to give info for 100 square foot/9
square meter plots and 500 square foot/47 square meter plots.
This is especially important for gardeners trying to sandwich their
gardening before and after work in the available daylight.
For either of these, ball park estimates would be helpful and so would
specific suggestions if any of your gardeners keep detailed time records.
We have some rough estimates from some of our experienced gardeners, but
none of them have previously thought much about how much time goes into
various categories of tasks. And we also have tried to extrapolate from data
kept on larger gardens, but we need a way to get more specific info related
to the changes due to economies of scale in larger gardens.
Sharon
[email protected]
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services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out
how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org
To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected]
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