About community gardens

An evaluation by Russ Grayson + Fiona Campbell - April 2000

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EFFICIENCY

Efficiency in using waste materials

Community gardens are efficient in the utilisation of limited resources. The lack of funding encourages the reuse and recycling of materials:

• the composting of organic wastes provides a cheap but nutritious fertiliser in most gardens; stable sweepings from racecourses and stables and from the Mounted Police stable in Redfern are used for mulch and compost production in several inner-urban Sydney gardens
• the UNSW Community Permaculture Garden has sourced food wastes from organic food retailers in the area
• the Waverley community garden has received regular deliveries of food waste from Macro Wholefoods, a local retailer; in return for accepting the waste, the store has provided the gardeners with non-hybrid vegetable seed
• discarded building materials are used for garden construction; Angel Street Permaculture Garden, in Newtown, has made use of concrete paving broken up on site to pave garden paths.

Efficiency in food production

Community garden productivity is far below their potential food production capacity.

This is because:

• gardening skills are generally underdeveloped
• gardener's time is limited because of the demands of other areas of life; many gardeners attend their crops only once a week; some several times a week if they live nearby, as did some Randwick Community Garden members and gardeners at the Waterloo estate gardens.

Garden productivity could be improved through:

• adoption of optimal planting patterns (plant spacing)
• increasing plant diversity (the number of different plant types grown in an allotment) for a balanced diet
• successional plantings of a particular crop through the growing season
• access to planting calendars showing what plants to plant on a monthly basis a better knowledge of soil improvement
• larger allotments in which staples such as root crops (potato, sweet potato, taro) could be produced in reasonable quantity.

Productivity is potentially enhanced where gardeners have access to someone with horticultural knowledge. The UNSW Community Permaculture Garden has benefited by having a trained horticulturist as a participant.

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PAGE UPDATED... Monday, 14 January 2002