About

Bock Community Garden opened in 2009.  It is uniquely set on land that is part of the City of Middleton's Bock Forest Restoration project.  This creates a special relationship between the Bock Forest and the Community Garden which includes gardeners providing volunteer service to help with planting the native prairie restoration areas and caring for a native tree nursery.

The Bock Community Garden is a city entity which is overseen by an independent, volunteer board and garden committee.  The board meets monthly and helps to make sure that the operations of the garden are successful each year.

Given the history of the establishment on the garden and it's unique position on public lands that were acquired for conservation purposes, the Garden has fairly extensive rules which include requiring gardeners to commit to a minimum of eight hours of volunteer service within the garden each year.  For more information, consult the Rules and Guidelines document.

Relationship with the Bock Community Forest

In 2008, the City of Middleton acquired the land which has become known as the Bock Community Forest.  The City in cooperation with Biologic Consulting , LLC  prepared an ecological assessment and management plan for the restoration of the Bock Community Forest. The goal of the restoration project is to attempt to restore the land to something resembling its pre‐settlement condition.  Original survey records describe this land as “prairie changing over to scattered burr, white and black oak stands with grass underneath” – or what today is known as oak savannah.

According to the management plan, the land was farmed until the 1980s. From the 1980s until 2008, the land underwent no significant management except for an occasional mowing. The plan is to establish an area which transition from prairie to oak savannah to oak woodland . The south end (around the garden) will be planted to prairie forbs and grasses.  To the north of the prairie, trees will begin to appear as an oak savannah and then become more numerous and denser to form an oak/hickory woodland

 So what does this all have to do with Bock Community Garden?

 The original restoration plans did not include a community garden. When Friends of Pheasant Branch were raising funds to buy the property, there was no mention of a community garden. The Bock Foundation is primarily interested in forests.  When the establishment of a community garden was proposed to be placed on the Bock Forest land, some of the Bock Forest restoration stakeholders felt that putting a community garden on conservation lands was improper.

In the end, the garden was allowed with the caveat that gardeners participate in the restoration and stewardship activities within the conservancy. The idea is to increase citizen involvement and sense of ownership of these conservation lands by involving gardeners in the stewardship activities. Bock Community Garden has a mandate to help out with the restoration project.

As a result, when the garden opened in 2009, Bock Garden established a native tree nursery to the north of the garden.  Trees will be transplanted from the nursery area into the conservancy oak savannah and woodlands areas.  Inside the garden, there are several areas which are used to grow native plants to produce seed for planting in the conservancy as well as plants to transplant in the restoration areas.  Middleton Public Lands planted a native plant demonstration area on the hillside along Highland Way and Bock Garden assists with the care of this area. In November 2012, Bock Garden volunteers helped to seed a large prairie restoration area west of the garden as well as portions of the hillside along Highland Way.

Many prairie plants are very slow to establish and will not flower or grow very large for several years.  The planting may be mowed in the first two years to keep weeds down. By the third or fourth year the prairie restoration will undergo prescribed fires, which will further reduce weeds and promote the fire adapted native plants. As the prairie becomes established gardeners and community residents can expect to see biological diversity take off with an ever‐changing pallet of wildflowers, grasses, birds, mammals and insects.