Community Gardening Tips

Community Gardens - Our Experience

A few months ago, we were approached to give our top tips for an up-and-coming community garden. Here is a summary of our top 6 tips:

• 1. Proper Agreement for Land

     • Make sure you have a proper agreement for occupying the land, and you know exactly what this means.

  2. Legal Standing

     • It is helpful for your group to have some legal standing: for example an Incorporated Society or Community Trust.

  3. Water and toilets

     • Work out in advance where your water is coming from.

  4. Soil Testing

     • Have your soil tested before you start.

  5. Finances

     • Setting up costs money! Try to organise some financial grant to get started.

  6. Meetings

     • Have regular meetings, formal or informal, and foster a sense of fellowship and community.

We were also asked what made our garden so successful. We felt there were many reasons, but good leadership was unanimously given as the main reason by our group. We also feel that people find us welcoming, accepting, flexible and relaxed. At the same time we are well organised. Our garden leader has a clear idea (& a written notice) of what we aim to achieve at each working bee. Communications are clear, and people know how to find out what’s on.

We were also asked if there was anything that wasn’t successful, that we have adapted or discarded. As the garden was being set up, some grandiose plans were modified in favour of what was more realistic e.g. a hangi pit, hosting other events, a composting toilet.

We soon realised that thermoses for morning and afternoon tea worked well. A volunteer brings milk, other supplies are bought or donated, and people bring baking or snacks if they feel so inclined.

We also noted that organising rosters didn’t prove to be necessary.

Overall, we have gained many things from our community garden experience:

• • A sense of belonging to the community and meeting other people in the Valley; making new friends.

  • Development of informal support networks.

  • Being part of an all ages group.

  • Learning about gardening e.g. what grows well in Dunedin, how to save seeds, how to manage compost, how to look after plants, when to plant different things in our climate, and so on.

  • Crop rotation.

  • Organic style gardening.

  • Recipes for using garden vegetables, especially those vegetables we were unfamilar with!

To read all our suggestions and advice in full, click on this link here.

Books

We have some books to share about gardening. Ask at the working bee, or send an email to nevcommunitygarden at gmail dot com, if you would like to borrow any.

• 101 Garden Ideas, New Zealand Gardener

• Garden and Patio Building Book, Sunset

• Garden Herbs, Christina MacDonald

• How to grow herbs, Sunset

• New Zealand Vegetable Gardening Guide, Eion Scarrow

• Outdoor Kids, Jamie Durie

• Plant me instead, weedbusters Canterbury and Otago

• ‘Star’ Garden Book for the South Island

• The Australian Vegetable Garden, Clive Blazey

• The New Zealand Pleasure Garden, Beatrice Hale

• Wood Projects for the Garden, Ortho Books

No-dig garden beds

No-dig garden beds were created with railway sleepers in May 2011. They were easy to make, but didn't work that well for us. Photos and a description can be found here.

Tips

Chives

- Remove flowers to have a continuous supply of chives.

- Cut back the entire plant, just a few cm above the ground, to promote new growth. Do this when the leaves become too long to stand up straight. The plant starts growing back in just a few days!

Oregano

- Remove flowers, as these will make the leaves less strong in flavor.

Strawberries

- Strawberry plants will generally only produce fruit for about 3 years. After 3 years, cut off the new runners, remove old plants and plant the new runners. These are your new plants and will produce for another 3 years or so.

- Runners are the horizontal stems, above the ground, that will eventually grow new plants.