Hi Laurie
You're gardening in my former stomping grounds (the bay area). Lucky you to have such a long growing season! Here in Salt Lake, the snows have just started covering the ground. There are several links on our website to guides for starting a community garden. There you will find very comprehensive to many of your questions, and questions you may not have even thought to ask. www.wasatchgardens.org/UCGN Some quick answers to your questions: How much time from members does it take for your garden to manage itself? The garden does not completely manage itself, and we are always trying to do better. If each person put in 6 hours per year, we would be well on our way. The most time we spend is on getting a solid meeting together in the spring and fall, following up with a written summary of each meeting, and tracking volunteer hours and notifying people if they're not meeting their contract. We found that some people don't like all these rules and enforcement, but other people work well with it and appreciate that everyone is asked to contribute. The bottom line is that if you don't require something, most people won't do it. Do you require volunteer hours? How is that working for you? -We require 2 hours each season (spring, summer, fall). People can fulfill their hours by attending our spring/fall meetings, attending a work party session, or doing jobs on their own. Hours are self-reported. If your garden ever has required volunteer hours, what was your experience? -You have to notify people if they aren't fulfilling their hours. You also have to have a reasonable number of hours so that you can actually enforce the requirement. Also, giving gardeners options for ways to fulfill their hours is important. It's good to have a list of things people can do in their own time posted at the garden. Do you require attendance at meetings? -no. If so, what is your experiences with that, do people like it, resent it, or what? For Organic Gardens - how do you manage compost? One of our gardens has a few individual bins that people can use for themselves. Other gardeners use areas within their plot as a compost pile. One of our gardens has a 4-bin system that is collectively run by a compost committee. We don't allow food scraps in the gardens, since even when managed very carefully (which is usually not the case in a community garden) they tend to attract flies and varmints. This doesn't help our neighborhood relations, so we ask people to keep food scraps out of the compost. We do a collective purchase of compost each spring. Gardeners can sign up and give us a check and then we have a massive delivery to the garden. We also coordinate deliveries of wood chips to the garden. This helps with covering the pathways and keeping down weeds and mud.
