Top community gardening resources for Australian gardens

Community Gardens Australia has gathered the most practical, highly-rated resources to help your community garden thrive. From Gardening Australia episodes to podcasts, magazines, and sustainable networks, these picks deliver actionable advice and real community stories for Australian community gardens.

Books

• Flavours of Launceston is a 112-page spiral-bound recipe book that can lay flat on your kitchen bench. There are 59 recipes from community gardeners around the Launceston area of Tasmania.
• Community Gardens Penny Woodward and Pam Vardy, a classic which revels in the richness and diversity of these inner-city community gardens, and let the people who use them be your guides to the many fascinating and unusual edible plants they grow and use, their stories, touching on the events that brought these extraordinary people from over 20 different countries to Australia.
• Start a Community Food Garden: The Essential Handbook by LaManda Joy the founder of Chicago’s Peterson Garden Project and a board member of the American Community Gardening Association. She has worked in the community gardening trenches for years and brings her knowledge to this hardworking guide which covers every step of the process: fundraising, community organising, site sourcing, garden design and planning, finding and managing volunteers, and managing the garden through all four seasons.

Shows and films

Recuperate after a long day in the garden and get inspired.

• Gardening Australia is Australia’s #1 gardening program for a reason with dedicated community garden episodes showcasing real shared growing success. We enjoyed Seeds of Connection (Series 35) where Jane Edmanson tours Brunswick’s Seeds Community Garden with no-dig permaculture, food sharing, growing 1 tonne annually for charities.
• Fantastic Fungi, Louie Schwartzberg’s stunning film reveals the underground fungal networks essential to healthy soil. We are soil farmers and it’s so important to consider what is happening below the ground as much as above.
• Kiss the Ground shows how regenerating soil can stabilise climate, restore ecosystems, and create abundant food – aligned perfectly with what we do as community gardeners!

Podcasts and listening

Podcasts fit busy community garden schedules, perfect listening for weeding sessions or pottering around the patch.

• Sense-Making in a Changing World with Morag Gamble, this podcast explores ‘what now’ — what thinking do we need to navigate a positive and regenerative way forward; what does a thriving one-planet way of life look like; where should we putting our energy.
• The joe gardener Show with Joe Lamp’l, US based gardener Joe shares practical tips and information to help you become a better, smarter gardener with an emphasis on organic gardening and growing food. Episode 461-Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Hidden History of Urban Food Growing was really interesting exploring the origins of community gardening.
• All The Dirt with Steve Wood and Deryn Thorpe features a few episodes on community gardens among the hundreds in the catalogue, using their decade of gardening, sustainability and environmental knowledge to create Australia’s most popular gardening podcast.

Must-read magazines

Pip magazine was started by Robyn Rosenfeldt in 2014 as a way to share ideas, information and inspiration about living more sustainably using permaculture principles. The articles are practical, clear and accessible; you don’t need to have extensive knowledge about permaculture or sustainability to get something out of it. But it is also relevant to those who are already living a sustainable life and want more ideas and inspiration.

Articles encompass no-waste living, growing food, making compost, foraging, seed saving, preserving, fermenting, beekeeping, keeping chickens, green building, repair, DIY, crafting, recipes and much more.

Pip magazine is a proud partner of Community Gardens Australia and offers CGA members an exclusive discount on their publication.

To access your discount:

Log in to your CGA account online and visit the Member Discount Codes page

Use the Pip code at checkout on pipmagazine.com.au

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