Community Gardens or Community Gardening?

How’s this for an idea?

There are a lot of community gardens popping up around the place. As I travel round talking about permaculture and delivering workshops a lot of people are in the audience because they want to start a community garden in their local area.

Great idea and power to them I say.

Community gardens are fantastic and there are numerous examples of how well they work in a wide range of areas; teaching people new skills, sharing community knowledge and know how, acting as a catalyst for community development, improving health and mostly for their ability to bring people together.

I strongly support community gardens and love them dearly and I’ll fight to the bitter end for my right to have a community garden.

But they aren’t for everyone. We have two very robust, busy, abundant (fast growing) acres here and the last thing I want to do is go and work in a community garden. I’ve got a huge one right here.

When our Transition Town first started sprouting ideas a community garden came up – as it often does when people first start getting together to discuss resilience and localisation.

But we quickly realised it wasn’t for us.

We did think about supporting the local school in setting up a garden and then perhaps people who didn’t have much land in town or were renting could garden there on weekends treating it as a community garden, but that never eventuated.

A community orchard was more our style, less work, something different, but that too is on hold.

After a discussion I had on Tuesday morning at one of my talks I got to thinking about ‘community gardening’ as an alternative or add-on to ‘community gardens’.

There are lots of ways to get gardening in your community. Permablitz is one fab example.

Chris from Slow Living Essentials has a great Friday Veggie Group – a group of women who get together every Friday to garden, chat and eat yummy food. They rotate through each others’ gardens so you get help at your place and get to visit other gardens and lend a hand.

I think this type of community gardening is great. It gets food happening in backyards, which is vital. Some community gardens do this too with outreach programs and I think its one of the most important services a community garden can provide – making changes out in the community.

So aside from Permablitzes and Friday Veggie Groups, what other community gardening ideas have you heard about or are part of?

Disclaimer: I’m talking about local food at the Woodford Folk Festival this year and it would be great to include some other actual examples of community innovation happening out there.

Cheers,
Sonya