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Central Coast Urban Gardens

Sustainability Problem and Proposed Solution:

The multi-year drought on the Central Coast led community garden projects to confront water management and reduce use. Some gardens implement water use rules and conservation policies, yet few gardeners actually know how much water they use and few know management strategies to conserve water. This lack of understanding reflects gaps in urban agriculture research that my research aims to address.

Water use and management within community gardens is a growing issue in water stressed urban landscapes like California. The current drought in the Central Coast has led many garden projects to confront their water management and use. My project’s objective is to use participatory research to study and understand water use in urban community gardens, and to thereby increase and promote water conservation among gardeners. My project invites volunteer gardeners from 20 gardens to collect information on their water use for 2-week periods in the summer of 2017. I will examine relationships among the amount of reported water use, frequency of watering, soil moisture, temperature, and reported management practices with the collected data. I will share results back with gardeners via written reports, garden presentations, and public presentations at local community centers in Santa Cruz, San Jose, and the UCSC campus open to all interested in learning about water conservation in urban agriculture in the summer of 2018.

Metrics for Success:

I will measure the involvement of both students and gardeners in the design and implementation of the project as a metric of project success. Further, I will measure the success of the project using survey questionnaires disseminated to gardener participants to evaluate the effectiveness of project participation. Further, I will ask follow up questions months after project completion to ask whether or not pamphlets and presentations were informative and useful.

Next Steps:

1) Complete two, three-week sessions of water metering (July, September 2017).
2) Provide and present the findings in written reports at garden meetings, at which we
will solicit gardener feedback and analyses (Winter 2017/18).
3) Prepare pamphlets and management guides with the final results to then disseminate
at community and campus workshops and presentations (Fall 2017, Spring 2018).

Result Categories:

Infrastructure/Built Environment

Behavior Change

Technology

Education/Outreach

Data Collection & Analysis

Results:

This project will result in an increased understanding of how water is used and how it can be conserved in urban gardens. I will share the results of the project to the UC Santa Cruz Campus community and the greater Santa Cruz county community to increase the project’s impact in the region. I will develop and run workshops on water conservation at campus community gardens in collaboration with my intern/research team in Fall 2017 and Spring 2018. We will provide pamphlets and guides to campus gardeners for them to use to inform their crop, soil, and water management.