What’s a Farmscape worth? For cars, you can look up their Kelly Blue Book value; for houses, you can have an assessor visit; even baseball cards have a Beckett value. But there's no third party evaluator for a Farmscape.

With this void in mind, I decided to take a crack at determining a formula based on my conversations with members, survey results, and anecdotes collected from garden managers. Here’s what I came up with:

Value = FV + P + C + L + E + F + S

For each member the weighting of those variables is different but it is usually based on some combination of the following factors:

We had an interesting problem at our nursery in Claremont a few weeks back. I'd sheet mulched the nursery with free wood chips from a local tree service and cardboard from Pomona College. It's a cost effective method for removing grass and keeping the area attractive, but it provides an ideal habit for Earwigs. Normally we don't worry about earwigs in our gardens because they leave mature plants alone and eat aphids and other pests. In the nursery, however, they were absolutely decimating the young plants, whose succulent growth they prefer. I'd leave at night with everything looking fine and the next morning there would be little more than a piece of stem poking out of the soil.

People commonly ask us: why do you prefer raised beds? I could answer this question in many ways, because there are a variety of benefits unique to raised bed gardening. 

• Warmer soil temperature earlier in the season. Raised beds lead the season change faster because they are effectively less insulated than their in-ground counterparts. Because raised beds allow for a warmer root zone, we can plant summer fruiters earlier in the Spring.

• Pest Deterrence. In our experience, far fewer pests make it up over the side of a 1.5’ bed than would pile into a ground-level garden. In particular, high gauge “gopher” wire we attach beneath the bed prevents tunneling vermin from assaulting crops from below.

• Attractive. We don’t mean to boast, but we think the beds look pretty good.

• Easier Gardener Access. Tending the crops in a raised bed does not require a full stoop or squat. You cook your food on a counter rather than down on the floor. Why not grow it up off the ground as well? This back-saving adds up with large garden square-footage; our weekly gardeners tend thousands of square feet of garden per week.