At the community gardens this year we'd like to help gardeners work on two time management issues in the community garden plots.
1) Balancing time on garden tasks. One thing we have noticed is that gardeners tend to focus on one type of task and all sorts of other things fall by the wayside. This tends to have a negative snowball effect in that it leads to extra work down the line for weeding along with lower yields. We'd like to encourage doing tasks in each major category when they come to the garden. For example during the late spring/early summer transition phase a gardener could spend part of their time at the plot harvesting spring vegetables, some time weeding, a chunk prepping the ground for summer planting, and part planting summer transplants or seeds. In this way there would be less weeding work and greater, steadier yields. If you have thoughts about portioning out the time and tasks at different times of the year, that would be greatly appreciated. 2)We also find that people new to gardening, especially those without gardener relatives often are surprised at how much time gardening takes. In the cases of some who lived in areas without gardens to walk or drive by, we have discovered that some people think that you plant seeds and then come back later and harvest vegetables. They are unaware of the gardener's activities in between. What we'd like to do here is give people some estimates for the average number of hours per week they could expect to spend on their plot to get reasonably good results. We'd like to give info for 100 square foot/9 square meter plots and 500 square foot/47 square meter plots. This is especially important for gardeners trying to sandwich their gardening before and after work in the available daylight. For either of these, ball park estimates would be helpful and so would specific suggestions if any of your gardeners keep detailed time records. We have some rough estimates from some of our experienced gardeners, but none of them have previously thought much about how much time goes into various categories of tasks. And we also have tried to extrapolate from data kept on larger gardens, but we need a way to get more specific info related to the changes due to economies of scale in larger gardens. Sharon gordo...@one.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20100117/89797b7b/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org To post an e-mail to the list: community_garden@list.communitygarden.org To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription: http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
