Organic Landscape Design

The land for the Boulder Garden has been sold for the construction of low income housing so we will not be gardening this site in 2010.  We learned some valuable lessons - including the fact that most people do not recognise the value of including many species in the design.  It seems most people expect a garden to be planted in rows and look 'neat', whereas, what we think of as 'natural' is also thought to be beautiful.  I wonder how aesthetics can be context dependent like that.

The Boulder Garden is on North Broadway next to the Boulder Homeless Shelter.  The property is owned by the Boulder Community Hospital which graciously granted permission to use the property as a garden until such time as they have another use for it.  The Homeless Shelter has given us access to their water.  We will be metering our water use and reimbursing the shelter for what we use.

The Property is 1.3 acres more or less and has the space for 175 key hole beds in this conceptual layout:

(right click on pictures to view image)

The first work day we laid out and manured 17 key hole beds and completed the sheet mulching of two as shown in the picture.  On the second work day we did some extreme gardening . . . We unloaded materials and sheet mulched one more bed.

At the Boulder Garden we had a garden coordinator off and on for a couple of months and we were never able to attract a group of people to take 'ownership' of the garden.  We planted tomatoes, beans, tomatillo, and acorn squash that was donated by the Growing Gardens organization in Boulder - unlike in Broomfield where the participants provided most of the seeds and plants.