Growing Gardens strives to be responsible stewards of the land we have the privilege of working on. This page provides an overview of our guiding principles, active projects, and strategic vision for how we care for our soil and the community that depends on it.

OUR REGENERATIVE
AGRICULTURE PRACTICES

  • Diversity in plants year-round
  • Planting a wide range of veg crops, flowers & cover crops
  • Microscopic diversity
  • Crop rotation to increase healthy soil
  • Intercropping annual crops (like veggies!) with perennials (like fruit trees!)

  • Keep as much as we can in the field
  • Mulching with plants & cover everything

  • We’re currently working hard at reducing tillage in our vegetable production. 

  • Planting cold tolerant crops that survive our winters
  • Immediately cover crop after an annual vegetable harvest
  • Focus on helping soil retain its structure and water

  • With a more thorough grazing plan

  • Invest in the social systems and human networks that are a part of these systems

WAYS WE ARE STRIVING TO UPHOLD THESE PRINCIPLES IN OUR FIELDS

Permanent beds for our annual vegetable production. Growing our vegetables in a permanent bed system will improve water infiltration, improved soil structure, reduced or eliminated dependence on plastic mulches and disposable irrigation, and a healthier overall farm ecology with reduced pest pressure and increased plant health.   A work in progress!

Reducing plastics Even organic agriculture relies a lot on single use plastic materials everywhere from the greenhouse to the field. We are taking steps throughout our production to reduce our use of these materials, which often means relying on higher labor and material costs.

Beneficial insects We love insects!! Some more than others…. We have had a lot of success managing pests in our greenhouses by introducing their enemies to the space. Enter, the Aphid Lion (aka Chrysoperla rufilabris)!

Apiary – The Growing Gardens apiary is a special place where we house the bees that pollinate our crops. Our bees work extra hard because they are also responsible for teaching the next generation all about how important and incredibly cool they are!

Holistic Planned Grazing – Holistic Planned Grazing helps ensure that livestock are in the right place, at the right time, and with the right behavior. Our goat herd, and the incredibly talented and committed graziers that manage them, have a big job to make sure that they are regenerating our land with their manure and hooves, while also getting the nutrients they need to be healthy and produce milk for our herdshare members.

CLIMATE RESILIENCE

Resiliency refers to a system’s ability to ‘bounce back’ after extreme disturbances. We have a lot of opportunities to see how resilient our farms are these days. Hail, floods, high winds, fire, extreme heat, drought, almost anything we can think of comes our way. Our regenerative practices help us develop more resiliency in our systems. Perhaps just as important as our soil health practices, is the community that we are a part of. Strong community connections and a thriving local food system makes us stronger, together, in times of extreme climate crises.

ON-FARM RESEARCH PARTNERSHIPS &
MONITORING PROJECTS

Compost for Carbon Project: This is a collaborative demonstration project with Growing Gardens, Zero Foodprint, MadAg, and Colorado STAR. The goal of this project is to understand the effect that switching to a permanent bed system and mulching utilizing high-fungal compost has on carbon sequestration and other biodiversity measures in intensive vegetable production and orchard systems, and our ability to reduce tillage, retain moisture in the soil, and improve soil health using compost applications.

Integral Water Resources Evaluation: We are really grateful to have the support of Integral a Boulder based Environmental Engineering firm, to help us quantify our irrigation water use and evaluate the benefits of various soil management practices on water use and crop yields at our community farms.

This project will (i) provide instrumentation and establish practices for Growing Gardens to quantify and document of their water use, (ii) evaluate the efficacy of various soil management practices on balancing irrigation requirements with achieving optimal crop yields, and (iii) provide educational materials for their youth programs and other growers in the community. (Examples of best management practices for soil health include reducing tillage, using ground covers and amendment, and planting living pathways, each of which can affect soil microbial health and how much water is needed for peak crop production.) An understanding of water use and its relationship to soil health practices will allow Growing Gardens to more wisely use its resources, support its goals of providing both food and education to the community, and advance their commitment to responsible stewardship of the land and the environment.

This radical, locally developed app, is helping us combine our research efforts and our field production data all in one place. Using this app we are able to track the intricacies of a diversified farm including our transhumance (how our goats migrate around the farm), practices being applied to individual fields and beds (e.g. compost applications, cover cropping, mulching, testing sites), monitoring for pest and plant health, and yield information all in one place. We’re telling y’all, this is COOL!

We are always delighted to host CU Boulder’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EBio) classes in our orchard each year as they learn the important skills around identifying and monitoring fruit trees and their place in our region’s history.

We are a proud and active member of the City of Boulder’s Cool Boulder campaign, which forms partnerships between the city, local organizations and communities to address the climate crisis and biodiversity loss through nature-based climate action!

We are a host site for heat mapping monitors for this effort by the City of Boulder to demonstrate the importance of vegetation and tree canopies on urban temperatures in the context of climate change.

Growing Gardens is fortunate to have the avid eyes and lenses of our committed ‘birder’ groups keeping a tally of all the species of birds that call the Gardens home. You too can keep an eye on what birds are passing through using these excellent eBird links that are regularly populated by our local ornithological enthusiasts. 

Illustrated Bird Species Checklist for the Hawthorn Garden

Photographs by Richard Trinkner

We partner with Xerces, the People and Pollinators Action Network and many other fantastic pollinator advocates to prioritize pollinator health on the lands we steward.

The Citizen Science Soil Health Project is a 10 year long project to help Colorado Front Range growers prove they are improving their soil. We participate in soil testing and analysis as a part of this effort and are rewarded with excellent peer-to-peer insights from other growers in our region.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Growing Gardens has spent the last few years laying the groundwork to monitor our agricultural practices and their impact more strategically. We hope to continue observing, adjusting, and learning from our community, and our lands, into the future.
Stay tuned to see what we’ve learned!

Healthy soil with worms!

Maximizing use of urban spaces

Next generation harvesting

Veggies being sent to farmworkers who feed us all

Cilantro flowers with a bee

Diverse veggie bed

Mowing cover crops between beds for mulch