A bilingual, bicultural community garden at The Orchard Church in Carbondale is closing at the end of the fall harvest season to make way for housing.
For about 15 years, the Good Seed Community Garden has been a source of food, outdoor education and camaraderie for a diversity of local residents, but the church owns the land and plans to build up to six homes for its staff on the property. It's a choice between two things the Roaring Fork Valley badly needs: housing and outdoor spaces that provide food and community.
Now, Good Seed gardeners such as Brittany Bresha are reflecting on their time growing together and beginning to search for a new home.
On a crisp fall morning, Bresha walks past a painted sign at the gate that reads “El Jardín de la Buena Semilla, The Good Seed Garden” and checks what’s left to harvest: kale, a big head of cabbage, tomatillos and corn.
“It’s just been raining, and so all the plants should be pretty stoked about that,” she said.
When Bresha moved to Carbondale about five years ago, she was excited to join a garden that served both English and Spanish speakers. She said the Good Seed helped her meet a diversity of new people and become part of the community.
Many of the gardeners on the upper terrace where Bresha's plot sits are Latino, and she said the garden helps bridge the divide between Carbondale's white and Latino communities.
"I am deeply disturbed by the level of segregation that we ignore on a daily basis," Bresha said. "In the garden, none of that other stuff matters. We grow. We tend to our plants. We tend to each other."
Getting her hands in the dirt also keeps her grounded.
"Once you start weeding, you just keep going," Bresha said. "You know, and hours pass, and you just have a sense of calm — it's hard to find those spaces."
Bresha works as a massage therapist and a caregiver, but those jobs don't cover all her costs. She uses the Lift-Up food bank, and she said the garden also helps her save money on groceries. A plot costs about $40 for the season, with water and tools included.
"I come here and I clip my kale and my little zucchinis and my carrots and I don't have to go to the grocery store," she said.
This year, there are about 40 gardeners and 82 plots at the Good Seed, according to volunteer garden manager Jae Gregory. Like many of the gardeners, Gregory initially became a member for the growing space.
"I was looking for a community garden because, like a lot of people in the valley, I had a really small yard, and I really love to garden," she said. "The community feel was a real bonus that I didn't expect."
Gregory, who joined the garden three years ago, quickly stepped in as the volunteer manager and has used skills from her landscaping business to keep it running smoothly, turning weedy, overgrown pathways into neatly mulched walkways.
"In this age of food insecurity and recalls and your inability to trust all the food that's actually in the grocery store, especially produce, it feels really good to eat your own lettuce from your own garden," Gregory said.
Land long set aside for housing
Earlier this past spring, The Orchard Church told gardeners this would be their last growing season because it was planning to repurpose the lot to build housing for future staff members.
Bresha was upset when she first heard the news and grieved for about a month.
"The fact that we have to choose between a space like this — that's offering food security, that's offering connection with the earth — between that and housing … it's like, 'Hello, who's paying attention?'" she said.
Gregory agreed, but she said reactions among gardeners were mixed. Newer members like herself and Bresha had put a lot of work into the garden in recent years not knowing it might close down soon — and they felt blindsided. But several longtime gardeners, some who have been there all 15 years, knew the church had always planned to develop the land.
"Housing's needed in the valley, but it was really devastating for all of us," Gregory said. "Absolutely devastating when you pour your heart into something and you're thinking it's going to be here for another, you know, 10, maybe 15 years, and then you find out it's going to end."
Daniel Self, lead pastor at The Orchard Church, said the congregation grew from about 200 to nearly 800 people in the last four years, and rising housing costs have made it difficult to bring in new staff from outside the area.
"I'm stuck between a wonderful garden and the realities of this valley, and it pains me, this decision," he said. "But seeing people in my church and community members struggle to find housing, that really has brought us to revisit the decision that's been looked at year after year."
Self knows the housing problem firsthand. His family benefited from Garfield County's affordable-housing lottery, and he said it would be difficult to live in the valley without it.
His father started the church in Carbondale in the 1990s and still serves as pastor emeritus. Self said the land next to the church was zoned for residential use and planned for housing from the start. Church leaders revived the idea in 2018, he said, before a leadership change and the pandemic put it on hold.
"The roots of this decision go back 36 years," Self said, "and it took a long time to get there."
Self acknowledged that many of the newer gardeners were not aware of the church’s long-term plans and he wished they could’ve given them more notice once they knew they would need to build housing there.
"I would have loved to give everyone five years' notice," he said.
A garden that grows community
Doug Stewart, one of the garden's founders, remembers how the garden began 15 years ago. He has lived in Carbondale since 1984 and was a member of The Orchard Church at the time. Back then, the lot was a weedy patch where construction debris from the church had been dumped.
In 2011, he and a small group of other local residents, including Fred and Dolores Pulver, Cindy and Steve Weaver, and Andy Lietz, approached church leaders with the idea of creating a garden and growing food for the community there. Stewart said the church agreed, with the understanding that the land had been set aside for future housing.
"The [church] leaders said, 'OK, well, you can have the garden as long as we don't need the housing," Stewart said.
Building the community garden was a huge undertaking. Stewart said the clay soil was so hard that when a volunteer tried to plow it with a large ranch tractor, the plow lifted the tractor's front end off the ground.
The gardeners were able to salvage a chain-link fence from old tennis courts where the Carbondale library now stands and a toolshed that was once the guardhouse for a Saudi prince, Bandar bin Sultan, in the Starwood neighborhood outside of Aspen.
The church contributed funding for lumber and supplies, and a family foundation, plot fees and donations helped pay for trees, flowers and irrigation. All the labor was volunteer.
For years, gardeners shared their harvests with Lift-Up and kept a working refrigerator on-site where a volunteer would pick up produce to deliver to the food bank. The garden also welcomed local school groups and outdoor education programs.
At the center of the garden, there's a circle of rose bushes with small plaques honoring several founding members who have since passed away, including Lietz and Fred Pulver.
Now that the last harvest season has come to an end, Stewart said his family and other founding members feel "a combination of melancholy and relief": melancholy because they have put so much of their time and hearts into this garden, and relief because it's a lot of work to keep it going.
"I'm going to miss the rhythm of having a community garden," Stewart said. "For us, it's just a bike ride away, ... and it's nice to come over and garden together and hear the birds."
Although Stewart is ready to pass the baton, he also wants to support a new generation of gardeners to find a new home.
"I think it's really vital for a town like this to have community gardens," he said. "There's nowhere else at this point for most of these gardeners to go."
Searching for a new home
The Orchard Church has submitted a site plan application to the town for up to six houses on the property, which could be developed in phases. The zoning allows for up to 12 units, and occupancy is restricted to employees of the church.
Self said the church hopes to finish the first house — a prefabricated home with three or four bedrooms — next spring. It's likely to go to a future executive pastor or youth and children's program staff.
Self said the church looked at buying a house or land elsewhere, but it didn't make financial sense when it already owned land that is zoned for housing.
He wants to help the Good Seed find a new location, and he has offered for the church to help pay for a new garden space. The church plans to store the fence and irrigation pipes, so gardeners don't have to start from scratch.
"I know it's a hardship. People have invested years here," Self said. "We, as the church, want to pay next year's dues, wherever they go, because it might be that they go to different gardens."
Self has talked with the Roaring Fork School District, which he said may have a few open plots at the high school garden in Carbondale. He has also talked with town leaders and the Carbondale Parks and Recreation Department, but so far, the town hasn't been able to identify an appropriate parcel of land big enough to accommodate a garden the size of the Good Seed.
Eric Brendlinger, who leads Carbondale Parks and Recreation, said the town's two other community gardens — Hendricks Community Garden, with 22 plots, and Demeter's Garden at the Third Street Center, with 40 plots — are both full.
Instead, the town is looking at where it can squeeze in more plots. A roughly 5,000-square-foot patch of Bonnie Fisher Park, which Brendlinger said was originally planned for an orchard or playground, could hold about 15 additional plots.
Promenade Park, north of the recreation center, has three plots used for a summer youth gardening program, with room for perhaps three to six more.
"So we're kind of looking at it as, 'OK, maybe we can get some plots here and some plots here,'" Brendlinger said.
Brendlinger understands the housing squeeze, too. He said qualified job candidates have turned down positions with the town because they couldn't find a place to live in Carbondale.
He said the town doesn't have an obligation to replace the garden, but he sees it as the right thing to do.
"Let's expand our local food production because that's going to matter down the line," Brendlinger said.
Brendlinger said the irrigation pumps at the town’s gardens are probably maxed out, so adding plots will require funding for upgrades. Parks and Rec has requested some funding in next year’s budget to start.
"It will take us a while to figure this out," he said. "We're gonna have to ask for some patience."
For his part, Stewart is glad to see the town playing an active role.
"If you think about parks and recreation, this is recreation," Stewart said. "It's not kicking a soccer ball, but it's certainly getting people outside, moving, doing healthy things, providing healthy food for their family and friends."
Gregory is inviting anyone who has access to land to reach out, but she said securing a future for the Good Seed will largely depend on the gardeners themselves.
"Our challenge is, as volunteers who all do many other things besides just this, getting together a little committee to get before the town and do everything that's necessary to make this happen," Gregory said.
Planting for an uncertain future
Back at the garden, Bresha harvests the last of her kale as the fog clears over Mount Sopris and birds snatch worms from the wet soil.
She may not be around to see a new garden come to life. She's thinking about leaving Carbondale next year because of rent increases.
For Bresha, losing the garden to housing feels like part of a bigger shift that she has noticed in Carbondale since she arrived.
"I've felt a shift in the culture and the community aspect," she said. "I don't want to have to leave, I don't want to have to feel like beautiful places are reserved for only certain people."
Bresha sees new-housing construction going up around town, but she said it hasn't made living here any more affordable. "Whatever we're doing is not working," she said.
Still, she hopes the community will see the value of preserving spaces such as the Good Seed that bring people together in nature.
"I've been seeing a lot of families this year come with their little kiddos and everything and riding in on their bikes and then riding away with all of their harvests," Bresha said. "I think that places like this community garden is what makes a community special."
Re-creating the Good Seed won't be easy, but Bresha hopes the gardeners can garner enough support and funding to make it happen.
"Of course I'm hopeful," she said. "But people have to find it in their hearts — they really have to carve out the time and energy, and they have to find the hope."
For now, Bresha is ready to get to work on a future garden, even if she won't reap the fruits of her labor.
"While I'm here, I'm going to invest in my community," she said. "I don't want to be a passive recipient of all that life has to offer. I want to be a cocreator of beauty on this earth."