We believe that when you change the landscape, you change the people who live there.
Due to challenges recruiting gardeners during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have suspended this program until further notice.
Imagine a city where every house grows food in the front yard. Walking down the street in that city, you would see people outside working in their gardens, people sharing or trading their vegetables with neighbors, and a community that’s in-tune with the local ecosystem.
Our free network in Boulder, Colorado transforms culture by connecting people with their food source. It’s based on a simple idea: we have landowners without time or energy to maintain gardens, and we have gardeners without land. We work to match these people.
Offer space in your yard or garden
Apply to receive space as a gardener
How It Works
For Boulder Landowners: Offering Space for Gardens
We are seeking landowners who want to host gardens on their property. Our community garden system is overloaded. There are long wait lists, and garden plots are expensive. If you have space you’d like to offer to the community for a growing season, we will help find gardeners to take care of it, cultivate it beautifully, and turn it into a productive and educational space. You can:
- Dig a new garden in Boulder: If you have a space you want to convert into a vegetable garden, we can arrange a volunteer work day to help with the transformation. The best plots are in sunny front yards—they are easy to access, plus you’ll transform your neighborhood space. We can connect you with volunteers to dig new gardens.
- Share existing garden space in Boulder: If you have space you’re not using, we can connect you with a gardener would be happy to grow it and keep it weed-free this year.
Basic agreements:
Growing gardens and maintaining land costs money. We like to make agreements clear The landowner largely sets the parameters for the relationship they have with gardeners. Here are the 5 areas we see agreements needing to be made:
- Cost sharing: We recommend one of three models: a) offer the land entirely for free, b) request that the gardener share 20% of the produce with you, or c) ask the gardener to donate 20% of the produce to a local food bank. Ultimately, it’s up to the landowner what they want to request in exchange for costs incurred. We strongly discourage money being exchanged in this network.
- Water: The garden plot needs easy access to water. We estimate water costs in Boulder to run 6 to 10 cents per square foot for the entire summer. Please keep this in mind when considering cost sharing.
- Access hours: The landowner decides which hours are ok for the landowner to visit.
- Private space: Unless other agreements are made, gardeners should not expect to enter your house or use your bathroom.
- Soil: Generally, soil amendments should be a shared cost—they offer short-term benefits to the gardener and long-term benefits to the landowner. It’s up to a landowner to decide how costs should be shared.
For Gardeners: Connecting with a Landowner
Gardeners take full responsibility for planting, care, maintenance, and harvesting of a garden plot. Essentially, you’re just gardening on land that’s been offered by the owner. See above for the agreements we ask gardeners to make with landowners.
To request a garden plot, click here.
For Volunteers: Digging New Gardens
The initial push to install gardens requires a lot of work. We seek volunteers to come together on work days and get gardens installed. This involves tearing out existing landscaping and sod, adding compost, and getting seeds or transplants in the ground.
For Schools: Volunteers for Summer Gardens
In Colorado, our growing season falls almost entirely during summer vacation, so schools have trouble maintaining their gardens. We connect the broader community with local schools to help maintain school gardens throughout the summer, turning school gardens into a community effort. If you’re interested in community help for your school, sign up as a landowner.
How It Works
What are our gardens like?
From our experience working small farms, we know that we can design urban gardens to be easier and more efficient. Our gardens generally follow these principles to make things as easy as possible:
- We dig gardens into the ground instead of building raised beds. Raised beds are pretty, but in Colorado’s arid climate, the water just drains out the bottom, leaving your garden dry too often. Raised beds are also expensive and hard to dig in. Our methods make installation and soil preparation easy while improving water retention.
- We design gardens to improve the soil. Most suburban landscapes were stripped of topsoil when the houses were built. Companies will sell off the topsoil, leaving rocky, bad soil everywhere. It’s a big barrier to growing healthy gardens. We use easy techniques, local compost, and careful plant selection to improve existing soil, regenerating the basis for healthy gardens for years to come.
- We design gardens for extended growing seasons. In Colorado, you can have an active vegetable garden for 10 months of the year! We begin with planting spinach in February, peas in March, and continue harvesting the last kale, swiss chard, and mustard all the way until Thanksgiving.
- We try to use existing irrigation systems. If your lawn has sprinklers, we’ll work to install paths on top of the water lines and garden beds in between. This minimizes cost for installation and makes maintenance easy.
- We plant open-pollinated (heirloom) seeds and strive to save seeds from the gardens. In conjunction with the MASA Seed Foundation, we work to cultivate locally-adapted varieties of plants and teach people about the lost practice of seed preservation.
What do we provide?
Groundwork provides the network! We also provide tools, seeds, expertise, and advice.
How much does it cost?
It’s free! We’re building a community network, not a business. Our goal is to change the landscape and grow great food. That way, the community is more productive, healthy, and beautiful. We don’t want to get rich, we want the community to feel rich.
Sign Up Today!
Whatever you’re looking for, we’ll find a space in the network for you. If you have questions, click one of the links below—there’s space in each form to ask questions.