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What About a Tool for Community Garden Organizing?

Reader Chris Davis wrote in about my recent guest piece at WorldChanging on neighbors sharing gardening space, and had an idea:

We’ve seen the power of online community organizing tools, but I’m not aware of anything that would allow people to indicate if they’d like to garden or else offer a small piece of land for others to garden. Do you think there would be sufficient interest in people using an online tool such as this? Picture something like a google maps community garden mashup… I’d be willing to help in its development, but I’m curious to hear what other people think about this idea first.

I told Chris I thought it was a great idea, and some of the comments on the WC piece suggested to me that interest is there. But, what do you guys think? Would there be sufficient demand for such a resource to warrant creating it?

I also noticed that one of the comments at WC came from RiverSider of the Save the Ribble campaign. Check out their blog (which Shea pointed out to me… apologies for being slow to post…).

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4 comments
  1. Lenore Hollowell

    I work at a Community Center in Columbus, IN and we will be doing at least one community garden this summer. We will take whatever help we find out there for connecting with others doing the same or who want to pitch in.

  2. Denise4Peace

    Yardsharing and urban farming are ideas whose time has come! Unsatisfied with my 8×15′ community garden plot, and acutely aware of the need to develop local food security strategies, I first started developing a yardsharing concept in late 2005. By mid-2007, my husband and I had relocated (specifically for the purpose of developing greater self-sufficiency) and my concept expanded to something like a locally owned, operated and supported backyard farming operation. Since then, reports of other yardsharing, garden-building and urban farming cooperative ideas have been first trickling and now streaming through the various lists to which I subscribe. A new site (http://hyperlocavore.ning.com) is dedicated to providing an online meeting place for people with idle land to connect with people who want to garden. So far, it seems the major interest is from gardeners who want to find more land. Finding the people with the idle backyards will, I think, require some old-fashioned pounding of the pavement, making of flyers and other more conventional means of promotion, until the people who have great gardens being tended in their backyards (and tons of fresh veggies and fruit from their own land flowing through their kitchens) start spreading the word to their other non-gardening friends. If you have a neighborhood association or belong to a church or social organization, see if they have a newsletter and ask if you can write an article on this topic. This thing is going to be big… as William Shatner would say: “REALLY BIG!” πŸ™‚

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