Growing the Black Mountain Community Garden
We’re always dreaming big at the community garden, whether it’s this season’s newest vegetable crop or improvements to operations. For nearly 10 years we have been working towards a masterplan that provides a community gathering space, greenhouse, accessible parking and and improved barn with office space. Our big dream is to build a two-story barn, event facility, and greenhouse on the site of our current barn.
Improvements include:
• A beautiful event facility with mountain views that can be rented for small events and used by the garden for educational workshops and community events.
• Extending the growing season and optimizing gardening operations.
• Replacing paper data collection with computerized data collection.
• Implementing automated data collection for harvested crops via a Pricing Scale.
• Automating reporting for both the town of Black Mountain and the granting agencies.
• Starting predictive planning and collection of data that can be used by gardeners and researchers (bee viability, climate change, etc.).
• Improved and accessible parking.
Provide members and community with education in Sustainable Gardening
- Support Garden Manager position – provides on-site, learning/coaching to both plot owners, town volunteers, and interns as well as various organizations providing youth programs in the garden.
- A place to gather for education events. Support for Staff to both obtain and provide education (e.g. budget for conferences, classes – travel, tuition, room and board).
- In 2021 we have developed proposal for the barn and greenhouse, and have acquired budgetary cost estimates to demonstrate the feasibility of the project.
