History

Bountiful Backyard was assembled in 2014. We began as a team of volunteers, leveraging grants and donations to implement garden infrastructure schools and community gardens in Benton and Linn counties. After branching out to include yearly do-it-yourself construction workshops and tours of farms and edible gardens, Bountiful’s work has developed into what it is today.

Initial momentum was funded by a grant from Oregon State University (OSU,) an OSU Vice Provost award in the category of Service, and several individual donations. Funds were used by Bountiful volunteers to build and donate garden boxes, worm bins, and rain barrels. This work streamlined a construction process, which Bountiful began sharing in 2015 by partnering with the Corvallis Environmental Center Starker Arts Garden for Education (SAGE Garden) to host workshops for constructing cedar garden boxes and rainwater harvesting systems. Workshop materials were sourced using individual donations and a grant from the Corvallis Evening Garden Club.

Also in 2015, Bountiful began partnering with the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition to offer annual walking and cycling tours of residential gardens, small farms, and school gardens. Bountiful’s participation in the Edible Garden Tours continued through 2019.

During these early years, Bountiful had been attempting to establish a hog pasture at OSU, in order to show students a lower-waste alternative to the university’s existing complete-confinement operation. This campaign brought together a number of organizations and created new, valuable partnerships.

In the spring of 2017, work began to incorporate appropriate technology prototyping. Our Board of Director’s engineering experience was refined through fabricating a friction drive human-powered generator that can be made of scrap materials, a solar distiller for cleaning water, and a direct drive human-powered generator for maximized efficiency—with the ability to connect to a variety of attachments. These machines have been showcased through the Edible Garden Tours and other events. New mechanisms have since been designed and implemented on farmers’ fields, such as a Chicken House Mover that enables a farmer to raise and lower heavy chicken houses.

In the summers of 2017 and 2018, we launched our first structured fundraiser: a multi-sourced, work/trade CSA. One intent of this is to enable low-income folks to receive fresh food from local farms. The first two years were successful pilot projects, and as we scale up we need to satisfy new requirements, such as refrigeration space. It is this project that evolved into the Philomath Farmers’ Market.

In academic years 2018/19 and now in 2019/20, we are managing OSU senior-level Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering design teams through the department’s “Capstone” senior project program, for assistance in designing our systems and prototypes.

For the latest most-recent updates, please feel free to contact us or visit the home page.

For fun, below are pages from our past projects:

	Program	Archival Description
	Tours	We offer free annual walking and bicycling tours of edible gardens and small farms. Join the fun!
	Workshops	Learn basic backyard woodworking skills and how to install your own rainwater collection system.
	Donations	We got our start by donating garden infrastructure to dozens of schools and community gardens. Learn more here!

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© Bountiful Backyard is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.