The Market Garden

The Market Garden was started in the early 1980s by students wishing to gain practical experience in small-scale, organic vegetable production and marketing. Currently, the market garden occupies four acres of land used for year-round crop production, various independent student projects and field activities for selected courses.

Produce from the Market Garden is sold to the ASUCD Coffee House and through the program's community-supported agriculture (CSA) project, Student Harvests.

Students are involved in all phases of organic vegetable production and marketing; these include growing transplants in the greenhouse, direct seeding and transplanting of crops, field preparation, irrigation, cultivation, pest management, harvesting, packing and marketing.

Some students develop independent projects as part of their Market Garden experience. Examples include producing greenhouse tomatoes, monitoring pests and conducting small variety trials. Students working in the Market Garden also may become involved in the farm's composting efforts, as the kitchen scraps from the Coffee House are back-hauled to the farm to be composted.

The marketing aspect of the Market Garden is unique on campus. It allows students to gain first-hand experience in producing, picking and packing a crop of marketable quality. Two distinct markets allow students to understand the sometimes "large differences" between marketing strategies.

For more information about the Market Garden, contact Raoul Adamchak at (530) 304-1898 or rwadamchak@ucdavis.edu.