Our Permaculture Life: Community gardens: learning and action for positive change

Community gardens: learning and action for positive change


I love community gardens and get involved with as many as I can. I love meeting with garden activists, sharing knowledge, and checking out innovative food garden ideas.  Particularly I love them because they are fabulous centres of community action for positive change.

Community gardens are so much more than growing food (this of course is centrally important!). Amongst other things, they are places to grow community and connection to place, and to cultivate a local culture of eco-living in urban and suburban areas. 

I've been leading permaculture workshops in community gardens and centres around my local region and the world for over two decades. These are great places to learn about growing food and living simply. I love getting hands on and practically exploring how we can grow an abundance and diversity of healthy food with ease - sharing practical skills we can take back to our own gardens and keep passing on - and making great friends along the way.

I spent last weekend at Lupton Park Community Garden in regional city of Maryborough - here's a short clip showing the gardens and what we were doing there....


I led four workshops which were free for the members of the Lupton Park Community Garden in Maryborough, QLD Australia. The community garden group (www.luptonpark.org.au) organised sponsorship from the local government, the Fraser Coast Regional Council, to run the event.  

Community gardens are wonderful places for learning about growing food and living sustainably in urban areas. Ever since I was part of the team that set up the Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane in 1994 (www.nscf.org.au) I've been passionate about the social, community and environmental benefits of community food projects.

To help connect and spread these projects further, I joined with others around the country back in the 1990s to form the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network (ACFCGN). It now has a website full of excellent information and an extensive list of projects around the country. ACFCGN also organises events and gatherings of community gardeners, city farmers and school gardeners. (www.communitygarden.org.au)

Next weekend I'll will be leading my weekend Introduction to Permaculture workshop at Northey Street City Farm and will post a short film about the gardens there soon after. The workshop is full again which is wonderful, and I'll be leading another there in Spring. In the meantime, I'll also be opening my garden for a series of one day Permaculture Life workshops in winter. 

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