Just a quick email to thank you for your ongoing support and to tell you of a recent success.

On Saturday Cringila PS won the Dig Ya Dinner competition at the Organic Expo and Green show held at Darling Harbour.

This was a competiton open to all schools in NSW, public and private, where schools had to bring their produce to the expo and display it in a wheelbarrow.

The quality of our vegetables was simply amazing and many people in the general public could not believe their eyes.

The competition was judged by Costa from Costa’s Garden Odyssey on SBS and we beat schools such as Vaucluse, Barker College, Menai Agricultural High school and Oyster Bay just to name a few.

We won prizes that can be used in our garden and a lot of media attention for the school as well as the broader permaculture partners.

It was a really magic day and great recognition of the work done by students, staff, parents and community at this school

We are so proud.

regards
David Lamb, Principal Cringila PS

I work for an organisation called Harvest Brighton and Hove based in the UK. We have scheduled a local food picnic on 25th September with many stalls and local food vendors and one of the stalls we are running is a food swap stall. I was wondering if you had any advice for running a stall like this. What is the correct format to use. Ie. do we use tickets and how do you gauge how much food is worth against other types of food or is it all about bartering and negotiating?

Any advice you may have would be greatly appreciated by us Limey Brits don’t you know.

Kind regards

Drew

With researchers increasingly turning their attention to the social and environmental impacts of community gardening, the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network has just published a fully revised and expanded second edition of its Annotated Bibliography of community gardening research and analysis. The new edition provides a comprehensive summary of the latest research right up to August 2010.

The Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network has produced the Bibliography in response to requests from students and researchers, and from gardeners seeking evidence of the benefits of community gardening to support their applications and submissions.

Copies of the 50 page booklet are available for free download here.

This leads naturally to the question of whether it is time to develop a set of guidelines to make these emerging forms of land sharing for food production mutually beneficial to land owner and land user.

What are they?

GardenShare: the use of  private, home garden space for the growing of food by people other than the land owner.

The land is usually home garden space, the use of which for food production puts it to productive use for home owners unable or not interested in using the land themselves. These may include aged people who can no longer maintain a garden or those otherwise uninterested in maintaining it.

The benefits of participation in GardenShare include:

• increasing the food security of people without access to gardening space through the practice of food gardening
• maximising the productive use of urban land.

LandShare: the use of private land for purposes of community gardening — the growing and production of food, primarily for the direct consumption of the grower, on privately-held land.

This could be tracts of urban land or rural farmland.

Initial proposal for guidelines

Following are some initial proposals for guidelines for GardenShare and LandShare.

GardenShare

People making use of private land as part of a GardenShare:

• leave the landowners a portion of their harvest so that the landuse becomes mutually beneficial.
• make no claim on the land owner for personal injury or damage to or loss of personal property; this encourages fairness to the land owner and the taking of personal responsibility by the land user
• use only organic gardening practices do as to avoid the accidental contamination of soils and gardens/crops of other land users
• negotiate with land owners equitable conditions for use of their land including times of access, water use, gardening methods and types of crops to be planted.

LandShare

Groups making use of private land for community gardening as part of a LandShare:

• make no claim on the land owner for personal injury or damage to or loss of personal or group property; this encourages fairness to the land owner and the taking of personal responsibility by the land user
• consider obtaining public liability insurance to cover their use of the land
• negotiate a mutually agreeable set of conditions for group access to private land for purposes of community gardening; a memorandum of understanding be drawn up to clarify this and signed by both parties
• use only organic gardening practices do as to avoid the accidental contamination of soils and gardens/crops and for the safety of gardeners and adjacent waterways and wildlife.

A monetary model

There may be potential for urban land owners to lease access for a small monetary charge to a portion of their otherwise disused home garden for people to grow food, probably in allotments.

This model has not yet emerged in Australia and GardenShare remains a non-monetary exchange. This would make GardenShares adopting this model more akin to a microenterprise for the land owner, yielding a modest income. The model could also be adopted through the non-monetary, community-based exhcange system known as LETS — Local Exchange and Trading System.

GardenShare/LandShare broker

Some motivated individual or organisation has yet to adopt the role of GardenShare/LandShare broker.

A broker would develop a database of land available and of people seeking these arrangements and provide a matching service.

Your contribution

Your contribution to a discussion on guidelines for GardenShare and LandShare are welcome.

Simply reply in the Comments box on this page so that we can build up a body of opinion.