Resources for setting up and running a community garden
Setting up a community garden to increase biodiversity, teach about sustainable food growing and to promote community and social wellbeing can be a major undertaking. It involves:
practical and horticultural skills related to creating and maintaining the garden,
social skills related to recruiting and retaining volunteers to manage the garden and
administrative knowledge related to legal requirements such as registering as a charity, ensuring appropriate policies are in place, and having insurance.
Various national organisations have produced guidance of the steps involved in setting up and running a community garden, including identifying future goals and recording achievements. A number of such guidance documents and websites are summarised here, and see links below.
Setting up a community garden
· Set up a community garden - advice from the Royal Horticultural Society
· Start a community garden - advice from the Eden Project
· The Grow Wild Guide - advice from Kew Royal Botanic Gardens
Assessing and setting targets for a community garden
Growing for Change, published by Sustain, September 2022
London Grows Wild, published by Sustain, September 2016
London Grows Wild: A guide to wildlife-friendly food growing. Published by Sustain
This guide provides checklists to assess how wildlife-friendly your garden is and how to improve biodiversity. Wildlife-friendly gardening can help improve soil fertility, assist with managing insect pests and increase pollination, leading to improved biodiversity.
Growing for Change: An urban food garden’s handbook for community, climate and nature. Published by Sustain
This handbook to urban food growing includes a self-assessment tool to be used to track and reflect on progress in a community garden and to identify themes to work towards over the coming year.
The Grow Wild Guide: setting up and running a community growing project - advice from Kew Royal Botanic Gardens
This guide draws on the experience of more than 400 UK community growing projects and explains how to create a community garden that helps increase biodiversity and brings social benefits to the community.
Start a community garden - advice from the Eden Project
This website provides an inspiring guide to the first steps of setting up a community garden, stressing that it can start from very small beginnings and very little funding.
Set up a community garden - advice from the Royal Horticultural Society
This webpage is a good place to start for information on many aspects of setting up a community garden