Getting the Most From Community Gardens

They can grow both food and bank accounts

Many are looking to community gardens now for increased food security. They won’t find it if they use them the same old way. While community gardens produce many social, health and environmental benefits, they have never produced significant amounts of food. Here’s how most community gardeners operate:
• don’t pool individual plots
• don’t plant strategically
• buy seed in volumes much too low to achieve significant supplies of food
• grow inconsistently with big gaps in supply during the season
• grow a little bit of everything and end up with little to show for the effort
• grow crops that are inexpensive to buy at local farmers markets
• grow crops that tie up a limited space for a long period of time
• don’t use time-saving tools that make growing easier and more enjoyable
• spend too much time planting and weeding
•don’t maximize harvests
• don’t put a dollar value on what is grown, or the time and effort spent

Community gardeners can get much higher food value from their plots by adapting the same small plot intensive SPIN system used by professional backyard-scale farmers. An organized, simplified approach to community gardening would look like this:
• production-driven
• team-based
• specialization of tasks
• post-harvest oriented
• multi-locational in scope

Systematized DIY food production encompasses planning, planting, growing, harvesting, post-harvesting and distribution. It enables community gardeners to produce a steady supply of a wide variety of vegetables that have all the nutritional value of farm-grown and all the convenience of store-bought, over the longest possible time during the growing season. It helps “professionalize” community gardening, so that the time and effort invested there can be valued in economic terms and be an incubator for microenterprise development. A problem that has plagued community gardeners is that their efforts are not taken seriously, and their plots are eventually sacrificed to a “higher and best use”, i.e., development. If some of them were regarded as business generators they stand a better chance of competing.

Just as SPIN helps backyard-scale farmers create and maintain a professional identity, SPIN-based gardening can confer purpose, legitimacy and a dollar value to community-based food production and serve as a testing ground for future farmers. For those gardeners who, often quite by accident, discover they have the talent and drive to “go pro”, the SPIN system makes it easy for them to convert their plots and entrepreneurial spirit into income.

Just think of where well-managed community plots grown at full capacity could lead: following a typical SPIN plan, a group of 5 community gardeners using 2,500 sq. ft. can produce $8k worth of vegetables in one season. Carrying this out a bit further, there are now 29,000 garden plots in city parks in just 100 of the largest US cities, according to the Trust for Public Land. Let’s say they were organized into groups of 5 SPIN gardeners. That would create 5,800 SPIN gardens, each pumping out $8k worth of vegetables in a season. That gives those gardens a total food value of $46.4 MM.

If anyone within those groups of gardeners decides to go pro, they have a role model in SPIN farmer Caroline Barrington in Swift Current SK. Caroline started with one community garden plot 8 years ago and now has 4 plots totaling 12,000 sq. ft., just a block from her home. From these plots she’s built a $20k/year business with 4 employees, while maintaining a 9 to 5 job and raising 2 kids. The operation is a side hustle now, but she regards it as a plan B in which she can ramp up her income by expanding the number of plots if she loses her job.

No matter what else community gardens produce, their worth, when measured in potential food value, can be significant. When viewed as an incubator for new local farmers, their value increases even more. What that requires is for community gardeners and those who support them to grow more than just community.

SPIN stands for s-mall p-lot in-tensive.
SPIN Farming is a commercial production system designed specifically for growing spaces under an acre in size. It was developed in the mid-90’s by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich. Those who practice it use gardens, community plots and vacant land to start and operate moneymaking farm businesses that serve the needs of local communities.

Related posts:

The process of finding 100 dreams was exciting and took me some time. I genuinely enjoyed collating these ideas and I am so happy to already have achieved some of them. I hope that by sharing my…

Can a single equation depict the whole working of our behavior? Is that simple to simplify them? No. But this equation contains everything you need to know about building good habits, shaping your…

I had been using Apache Sparks’s Python API, AKA PySpark, for over an year when one day, I ran into this error: Usually this leads to me trolling through similar errors on Stack Overflow, trying the…