How Community Gardens Survive Their Third Winter

What follows is the working version of seasonality in community growing projects: the decisions in the order you actually meet them, with the reasoning attached.

The seasonal curve

Community growing projects receive most of their volunteer offers in spring, when the work is pleasant and the results are immediate. Attendance falls sharply from October, while the site still needs maintaining, securing and preparing for the following season.

Perennial plantings, structures and paths deteriorate over a winter without attention, which produces more work in the spring than was saved. Groups that only operate in the growing season therefore start each year further behind than they finished. Planning the winter explicitly, with a small named group and a short list of tasks, is what separates projects that compound from those that reset.

Land tenure decides everything

What a group can plant depends entirely on how long it can be confident of staying, and short leases rule out anything perennial. Temporary use agreements on land awaiting development are common, and they are exactly the situation where fruit trees are a mistake. Longer secure tenure justifies infrastructure investment, which is what makes a site productive rather than merely occupied.

In the annual accounts, the tenure question should be settled before the planting plan rather than after, and it frequently is not. Where tenure is short, containers, annual crops and movable structures preserve the value of the investment when the site is lost.

Water, tools and the unglamorous infrastructure

Access to water is the constraint that most often limits a site, and installing it is expensive and rarely covered by planting grants. Secure storage for tools is the second, since tools left on site disappear and tools taken home mean nobody can work without one person.

Composting infrastructure, paths, and something to shelter under determine whether people come back in poor weather. These items are unattractive to funders and essential to operation, which is a recurring pattern across community projects. Building them in the first year, using startup funding that is easier to obtain, is considerably easier than retrofitting later.

Who the produce is for

Groups divide broadly into those growing food for participants, those growing for redistribution, and those where growing is a vehicle for something else. Being unclear which one you are causes recurring conflict about who may take what, and the conflict is always about more than vegetables. Written rules about harvesting, agreed early, prevent the situation where the person who did least takes most.

Sorting the donation bags, where produce goes to a food project, the quantity is usually far smaller than participants expect, which is worth saying at the outset.

The social and health outcomes of community growing are generally the stronger claim, and evidence on them is more encouraging than on volume of food.

The people side

Growing projects attract people seeking company as much as vegetables, and the ones that last recognise this explicitly. That means somewhere to sit, hot drinks, and a structure where a person can attend and talk without being handed a spade.

It also means the site needs a welcome procedure, since a self-organising group of regulars is unintentionally impenetrable to newcomers. Conflict over methods, particularly between organic and conventional approaches, is a recurring feature and benefits from an agreed site policy. The horticulture is the easy part and the group dynamics are what require attention.

Organisations need what they say they need, which is often unglamorous and often money.

Winter as a planning season

Use the quiet months for the seed order, the funding applications, the tool maintenance and the site repairs that cannot be done in summer. A short winter work programme with three or four dates gives the committed volunteers a reason to stay in contact.

Bought used, it is also the right time to review what actually grew, what nobody ate and what the site should stop attempting. Recruiting in late winter, before the spring rush, gives new volunteers time to be inducted before the busy period. A site that enters spring maintained and planned outperforms one twice its size that starts in April from a standing start.

The takeaway

Sort the water, the storage and the winter rota first, and the growing looks after itself.

Give the boring thing they asked for rather than the interesting thing you have.