Community gardens sprouting in Gunnison Valley

On a Tuesday morning, Western State Colorado University graduate Ian Oster stood on a pile of dirt in a small, floorless room in the campus’ new student apartment building. Behind him, current student and Mountain Roots Food Project intern Kyle Brookins placed venting into trenches he’d dug around the edges of the room.

Outside, workers raked dirt and prepared to put the finishing touches on landscaping. Elsewhere in the building, workers hurried to finish construction before students arrive later this month. But it is up to Oster, who is also Mountain Roots’ garden program coordinator,  and a handful of interns to finish this room—the future home of a campus greenhouse.
Sun streamed in through the windows, and even with the door cracked open, the room was hot. Oster and Brookins were installing a climate battery—a system that will shift hot air from the ceiling to the plant beds to help keep the overall temperature of the greenhouse more consistent. They’re also installing a fishpond, plant beds, and an irrigation system.
The hope is to have the irrigation system installed by the time school starts, but it will likely be December by the time the greenhouse is really up and running. When it is, it will be one of four campus gardens contributing produce directly to the school’s cafeteria. Part of the landscaping outside the new apartment building has been designated for a student-run vegetable garden, and a new hoop house—a rounded tunnel-like structure that uses solar radiation to warm plants and extend the growing season—has doubled the size of the existing community garden on campus.
“We’re basically quadrupling the capacity of campus gardens from last year to this year,” says environmental studies professor Jonathon Coop. He credits his students with making it happen. Students have been petitioning for a campus greenhouse for several years now, but last year Oster and another student developed a Campus Agricultural Master Plan as part of a capstone course taught by Coop.
Their plan included a proposal for developing the greenhouse in the new apartment building, which had been included in the architectural plans thanks to student input but hadn’t been fully designed. Add recent developments at Mountain Roots that allowed the organization to facilitate internships, and the result is a student-led campus revolution, where students will be growing food to feed fellow students. “That’s the beauty of it, the students are shaping their own destinies,” Coop said.
It’s indeed an impressive sight to see students and recent grads digging trenches and shaping in a university building. But what’s perhaps most impressive is that their efforts to create a local, high-altitude food shed are not unique in the Gunnison Valley. Community members across the valley are creating thriving community gardens, with Mountain Roots—which also brought the farm to school program to the valley—becoming the tie that binds. Together, they’re creating new models for local, community gardening.

Aquaponics: Community garden as an ecosystem
When Coop and Oster showed me the campus greenhouse, Oster leaned against a giant black tub, tipped on its side and partially buried in the dirt. It’s destined to become a fishpond at the center of the greenhouse, and when it’s thriving, it will not be ornamental. It will be part of a closed ecosystem, called an aquaponics greenhouse, where the fish benefit the plants and the plants are good for the fish.
Coop explained, “Hydroponics is a system where you can grow plants in a bed of clay pallets, and water is moving through that. Aquaponics is adding onto that system. You raise fish in tanks, and the water from those tanks is cycled through the beds where the plants are growing.”
Bacteria break down the fish waste to its most basic elements like nitrogen and other nutrients that plants will readily take up when the fish water is filtered through their beds. To make it a more complete ecosystem, you can even grow plants for the fish to eat.
Because of the operation’s small scale, the students won’t necessarily be providing a regular source of tilapia to the campus cafeteria. But the herbs they grow and the seed starts they produce for other gardens like the hoop house will contribute directly to the campus’ dining services.
“Anyone will be able to show up to the Rare Air Café on campus and buy a pizza, and it could have basil on it grown by students,” Coop said.
In the past, Sodexo, the company that manages the café, has let students cook local foods for special events. But this will be the first time students grow vegetables specifically for consumption by other students.
Oster’s master agricultural plan is becoming a reality. “This is empowering, it feels like I could do anything. But this took a lot of work, a whole semester’s worth,” Oster said. When he walks into the hoop house, he added, he can barely contain his excitement—he could just start screaming it’s so great to see.

Demonstration gardens: Gardens for community learning
At the north end of the valley, community gardens also seek to connect the greater community—in this case a town instead of a college campus—to local food. Community gardens in Crested Butte have an open door policy. At the garden on Ruth’s Road, volunteers are invited to participate in work days or work on their own. A chart in a small white trailer on the edge of the property lets people track their hours, and in return they take home produce from the garden.
Last year, the Ruth’s Road garden produced so much food the gardeners had a hard time using it all. Jonathon Brown, part of the crew that manages the plot, says the majority of it ended up going to the Vinotok feast. And this year, there have been more volunteers than there is work to go around.
“There’s definitely a record number of volunteers this year. It’s almost been difficult because everything is pretty well established. We have irrigation that handles all the water and the beds are in such great shape it’s almost not enough for the volunteers we’ve got,” Brown said.
It’s a good problem to have for a garden that was in part designed to teach high altitude gardeners new ways of planting. Mountain Roots director Holly Conn explained that the garden uses a block, or grid, planting system to maximize the available space. Instead of planting in rows, gardeners   planted in squares. “You can get more plants per square inch, and when you do that you get higher yield and it cuts down on weeds because the plants are shading their own area,” she said.
Already, gardeners from the Crested Butte Community School garden have come to check it out. And Mountain Roots incorporated a similar planting technique into a demonstration garden on Elk Avenue next to the Last Steep. But whereas produce from Ruth’s Road is a production garden, getting sold at the local farmer’s markets and the Four-way Stop in Crested Butte, the demonstration garden has been designed with education in mind.
By showcasing new techniques—like “lasagna beds” that layer cardboard and organic matter with dirt to create a richer soil through decomposition—the hope is to inspire gardeners to try new techniques at home. “It’s meant to be a place where residents and tourists can come and explore the space and when we realize the vision it will have official interpretive signage so it can be a self-guided tour,” Conn said.

Urban agriculture: Cooperative gardening
At the south end of the valley, gardens like the North Boulevard Agricultural Collective—or cooperative garden—are taking community work days to a whole new level.  Operating like community supported agriculture, where people buy food shares from local farmers at the start of the growing season, the gardeners at the cooperative garden (including Professor Coop) all pitched in $200 up front.
With some additional overhead from Mountain Roots, the group of about ten gardeners collectively purchased seeds, soil amendments, and supplies like row coverings. They worked together to prep the beds and plant, and throughout the summer they’ve followed a watering schedule. Professor Coop expects to get most of his investment back. About 20 percent of the produce goes to the Mountain Roots booth at the farmers markets; some of that money goes to the organization; and some goes back to the gardeners.
 “It’s really pretty cool how much you can grow here—Tibetan barley, quinoa, a couple different varieties of corn look promising unless we get a cold front, and standards like potatoes, onions, garlic,” Coop said. The real bonus, though, has been the sense of community.
“It’s kind of a cliché but there’s really no better way to build community than by working together and sharing labor with people. And of course most of us aren’t going to share labor for the sake of building community. We want to accomplish something. Working together to grow food is fun and makes good friendships,” Coop said.
It’s a sentiment seemingly shared by the Mountain Roots interns, who are also his students. When they showed me the hoop house, Coop and his students stood inside a tunnel of polyurethane. Tomato plants and other vegetables sat in pots, waiting to be planted in ground covered with compost produced on campus. One intern, Dakota, stooped down and picked a small, red tomato. He handed it to me, then picked more for his friends—for there was no strict professor/student relationship there.
While I ate my tomato—it was tart, and the seeds squirted out at the sides—they stood around and joked about the way they could stand around all day extolling the virtues of campus gardens. But they didn’t have to: the answer was right before me. They couldn’t stop talking about the gardens or the cabbage they needed to harvest and preserve. I lingered, taking pictures, and when I finally left, they were still talking and laughing. About sauerkraut, of all things, which they planned to make with the cabbage from their gardens.

For more information about valley gardens (there are far more than appear in this article), visit www.mountainrootsfoodproject.org. And on August 18, Mountain Roots will host a bicycle tour of local gardens in Crested Butte. To volunteer in local gardens or on campus, contact Ian Oster at gardens@mountainrootsfoodproject.org.