We are a Community Garden located on St. Albans City School property. Our members are dedicated citizens who share a love for gardening, preserving produce and sharing with our community. Our gardeners are active at Down to Earth Community Garden (DTECG) as well as assisting with St. Albans City School gardening and composting projects adjacent to the DTECG. We are lead by example gardeners and are generous with our time and harvest. We are in need of constructing and purchasing a garden compost system to handle garden and home compost . Our current compost system consists of 3 pallet bins that have been refurbished several times. The bins are difficult to manage as the height of the bins hinder some of the shorter gardeners to participate in turning/managing the compost.  Often times gardeners are unsafely standing on pails and wheelbarrows to manage the bins.  Gardeners routinely haul home compost to the garden during the growing season unless the bins are overly full or unmanageable, which has occurred several times in the last few years. We are in need of a more manageable 3 bin pallet compost system for larger stem/woody material garden waste as well as a quick turn around (Jora Tumbler) kitchen/garden fruit and vegetable compost system.  We propose incorporating both a 3 bin pallet system with lids and the Jora Tumbler system in our gardens to manage our dual compost needs. Our gardeners are ready for a productive change that will afford us to produce our own soil amendments, increase the viability of our gardens and offer a productive meduim for composing clean home kitchen compost waste.  Sustainable practices are of high priority to our group and we feel our garden should support and model this in our community, especially with ACT 148 upon us to ban food scraps from the landfill in all households by 2020.  The gardeners have agreed to take a 25 x 4 foot raised bed garden plot out of food production for the expansion of the compost project.  The added space will allow for a wheelbarrow to access the compost and create a wider access path to the compost to enusre manuverability and gardener safety.  We have attached a budget plan for funds necessary to launch this project.  There are questions that have emerged from conversaton around launching this project such as:

• how will we sustain carbon material allocation?
• how will we afford a compost steward in future years to manage the compost?