About community gardens

An evaluation by Russ Grayson + Fiona Campbell - April 2000

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SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability is the capacity to continue in a more or less self-sustaining manner into the future.

Factors affecting sustainability

A number of factors are important to the sustainability of community gardens:

• responsible management of the land in a way which meets the needs of the gardeners and the landholder
• administration - the management side of community gardening frequently eschewed by gardeners, including liaison with gardeners and landholder, induction of new members, organisational meetings, work on common areas (such as weeding and construction)
• training of new members; one inner-urban garden, for instance, provides no basic training for new gardeners, a practice which lightens the load on existing gardeners but which has alienated some would-be gardeners because they lack an understanding of what they should do in the garden
• the ability to raise funds to purchase public liability insurance; this is expensive and is an area where local government can assist
• security of tenure - gardeners require security of tenure if they are to put effort into garden development and management, particularly where high value crops such as fruit trees are to be planted (these take several years to bear fruit); Randwick Organic Community Garden underwent periods of falling participation due to plans by the landholder to sell the land for development - during these periods of low participation, site management became a problem; the possibility of council selling the public open space occupied by Willoughby Community Garden has had a similar impact
• the capacity to attract new gardeners to replace those leaving
• the attitude of local and state government landholders to community gardening.

Participation rates affect sustainability

Apart from tenure difficulties noted above, perhaps the greatest difficulty faced by community gardens has been fluctuating participation rates - community gardens seem to swing from too few gardeners to situations where a waiting list is set up to cater for demand.

Low levels of participation threaten the continued existence of community gardens because it sets up a positive feedback loop - too few participants leads to poor maintenance which discourages potential gardeners, exacerbating low participation and an unkempt garden.

For instance:

• during their peak period Glovers gardeners expended beyond the chainlink fence to terrace and cultivate the slope above; when participation in the garden fell, the terrace area was abandoned to the kikuyu grass as gardeners retracted their activity to a manageable area
• Randwick garden had a history of fluctuating participation; during periods of low participation the garden became unkempt with weeds taking over paths and invading disused allotments; deliberate attempts to stimulate participation were needed to save the garden.

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PAGE UPDATED... Thursday, 17 January 2002