Community gardening

I'm Councillor Glenn and this is my weekly update for Saturday, September 19th.

This morning, I'm at JoJo's Community Garden on Stittsville Main Street.

It is tucked in just behind JoJo's Pizza and a really special place.

If you've never visited here before, might be something you want to come and check out.

You are allowed, even if you're not a member of the community garden, you can come in and have a look and they host lots of events here.

In fact, A couple weeks ago, I was at the Stittsville-Goulburn Horticultural Society plant sale that they did under the veranda here.

On Thursday nights over the summer, they did some music nights and so on.

And it's a community garden, so it's all run by volunteers.

So just outside of eight mile.

And then the community gardens, one of them, the founding one is actually at nine mile.

So it's one mile outside of the border of Detroit.

Okay.

What fundraising tips or growth strategies might you want to share today with our listeners?

Yeah, so I have had the pleasure of sitting on lots of boards, ranging from at-risk teen youth to domestic violence advocacy.

I co-founded the Community Gardens, so I am currently the treasurer for that organization.

I'm involved with another one.

So comedy writer Sarah Naiman usually posts sketch comedy on her Instagram account.

But back in late July, she started dishing on all the drama going on in her community garden.

I brought a clip.

People say, what's your favorite thing to grow in your garden? What do you love to grow? And I say, nothing grows as strong and as sweet and as juicy as the hatred that these 65 and up year olds have towards each other behind their backs.

So her story is now a 15 part series with like between 78,000 and like over a million views per post.

And she is telling the real time gossip about how several people are squatting on plots, taking over abandoned plots, letting their own plots grow so that like aphids come and they menace other people's plots.

And I like this because I used to be a part of a community garden where there was lots of dysfunction.

So this started about a year ago.

Miriam, how does your group, Community Garden Support, come into this practically?

Well, my organisation, Community Garden Support, we're a Northern Ireland-wide organisation and we support community gardens across Northern Ireland.

So we've been working to build up networks of local community garden projects in different council areas and also to build up some of the skills in the sector.

For example, my colleague Conor has established a seed saving circle, which includes 23 community gardens across the Northwest.

So we're starting to build up our seed banks because especially after Brexit, getting access to seeds was difficult because of plant passports.

So Connacht's building up our own seed sovereignty in Northern Ireland.

we don't have time to grow our own

food.

And I have pitched a show to PBS, SoCal, and I got a letter of interest from them.

So now I'm looking for funders to underwrite my new gardening show centered around community gardens.

I love that.

And we are definitely going to manifest that with you.

And, you know, so you actually garden at your local community garden and it has inspired two novels as well.

What is it about that shared like a space that is, you know, private garden that you can actually like replicate?

I think community gardens, well, community is really the word.

It's this melting pot, at least my community garden is, and I know many of the others around me are too.

But sometimes a small group of people can take an empty space and turn it into something special.

Today's story is about a group of neighbours who decide to create a community garden.

It was a warm Saturday morning in May.

The sun was shining, birds were singing, and the village of Greenfield was slowly waking up.

She explained her idea, although this time in slightly more detail.

Now as you all may be aware from our morning conversation, we have this empty piece of land.

Now what if we turned it into a community garden? People looked at her.

Tom raised his hand.

And that's where Good Food Dunedin came from originally.

We've worked a lot in the community space, supporting community gardens.

One of the things that we've been doing is the community fruit harvest, which is organizing volunteers to pick excess fruit from householders' backyards and then distributing that across food banks and community pātaka kai and various other community organisations.

And quite an important part of our work more recently has been trying to get more people curious about our food system and understanding what's behind the food on our supermarket shelves.

And I think that's a really good place for it to be, because I think for us to be a food secure and food resilient, our local communities to be food secure, we really need to have sectors that support us and support not only feed our communities, but feed our economy too in a really sustainable way.

How do we actually utilize our land in sustainable ways that are feeding our economy, our communities, and our whenua and our water, our wai.

So, Robin, you talked about community gardens.

How many community gardens are there across Dunedin, you know, a place of 130,000 people? I