Reinhabit Co-op delivers regenerative landscapes and education to Denver area community

Dates: January 1, 2023 - December 31, 2023

Participants: 40

IMPACTS:

1. Built landscapes on multiple private yards from all seasonal and natural materials. These landscapes foster wildlife habitat, sustainable food production, and sequestered carbon.
2. Educated and trained community members on how to build and maintain regenerative gardens and participate meaningfully in their local ecosystems

Objectives

1. The goal of this project is to spread regenerative gardening practices, knowledge and awareness to people across the Front Range of Colorado, which will enable more participation in ecosystem services and stewardship among urban/suburban households.
2. Reinhabit gardeners build up their expertise, skills and knowledge, along with their ability to train others, while being paid for the service of creating habitat-supporting, carbon-sequestering, food- and medicine-producing gardens for clients.

What Happened?

32 unique households (on average, 13 households per month) located throughout the Denver area received over 50 hours of regenerative gardening services per month in this period.

Gardening services typically include such activities as: 

1. Coordinating, collecting and storing the essential natural materials (such as tree logs, branches, woodchips, manure, etc.)
2. Building garden beds
3. Setting up drip irrigation systems (high efficiency)
4. Propagating and planting sustainable plants
5. Composting

Gardeners also guide, coach and educate their clients about practices and philosophies of regenerative gardening, including how and why we balance the “needs to thrive” of multiple beings in our complex systems, just like an ecosystem would.

What Did We Learn?

People in our communities are hungry for knowledge about how to contribute supportively to their environments, especially participating in carbon capture. Our gardeners learn a ton through accumulating many hours of hands on regenerative gardening experience across a diversity of sites. We’ve learned we need to raise our rates next year, so as to also support expanded marketing efforts to ensure our program reaches more people. We also want to make investments to the cooperative organization, so the gardeners can more effectively self-govern and more efficiently organize clients and opportunities next year. We hope this will result in expanded success of the Reinhabit Co-op in 2024 and beyond.

IMAGES:

The first few pictures depict an actual garden build at a client property. The other images exhibit educational and hands-on workshops held by master regenerative gardeners at LSI’s primary location in Golden, CO.

LSI ED Caroline Savery with a Reinhabit Gardener (Michael Shube) and a Reinhabit Client (Bobbie Mooney