Why Would You Want to Build a Community Garden?

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Community gardens are popping up everywhere – never in my life time has personal home gardening and community gardening been more popular.

Why would you want to start or build a community garden?

You would assume the answer is obvious but as a co-founder of a community gardening group in the inner city of Sydney, my experience knows everyone’s answer will differ.

This week I was asked if I would be interested in being part of building a community garden in my home town in the Wollondilly Shire.

I went along to the first garden planning gathering to meet the other interested people and with the goal of understanding what everyone’s reason was for starting the garden.

To assume everyone else will have the same goals, is one of the biggest reasons community gardens fail.

Our new home town community garden group, have agreed to write down their vision / goal / objective statement for the community garden and bring the statements to our next gathering for discussion.

This will help us to know what is important to each other and then together work on one agreed, combined vision statement.

In my experience, it will be this statement that binds a community gardening group together in an united direction – now and in the future. 

I am excited to again find myself apart of starting a brand new community garden.

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One of the community garden patches installed in Green Square inner city of Sydney by the Green Square Growers.

13 thoughts on “Why Would You Want to Build a Community Garden?”

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  4. Reblogged this on Community Potpourri and commented:
    Community gardens are becoming extremely popular, particularly in urban areas, where gardening space is rare and precious. While we do hear a lot about the positive effects of these gardens on health & well-being and local communities, but setting up a community garden can be difficult where personalities and priorities differ. This article describes how a local community is trying to overcome these obstacles. A good read and definitely good advice for our community garden in Grahame Park.

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  5. Thank you so much for this article. This is something nobody ever seems to talk about, but makes big sense, as people join community gardens for different reasons and have different skill levels and preferences. Personally for example, I’ve never seen the point of just planting flowers and prefer edibles, while others are quite content with just marvelling at their beauty.
    I think the way you are handling these issues is a brilliant way to find common ground and ensure you’re all on the same page. I’ll definitely keep that in mind for our community gardens.

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    • Julia I am genuinely thrilled my words may help you and your community gardening group. Thank you for sharing your comment and my post by reblogging it. On another note I am with you regarding edible plants being my preference. Cheers 🙂

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    • James I understand what you are saying. Do you feel there is anyway for you group to work on an united compared goal statement James? (I know your group is not at the beginning stage).

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      • Oh we have goals and statements of said goals but people go maverick and flip the script all the time. Often at the expense of the plants we’re trying to grow. There are a lot of folks lacking the knowhow. Everytime I show up, I spend half my time fixing things. It’s a bummer.

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      • James working in any community group has it’s benefits but can also be challenging (Julia is correct with her comment that few people talk about these challenges). Honesty about the challenges can be of great benefit to other community groups. Thank you for sharing and your honesty James!

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