Ways to Get Involved
There are a number of ways you can become involved in community gardens in WA:
- Join your local community garden
- Support an established community garden
- Help start a new community garden
- Make land available for a community garden
- Support WA community garden sector coordination activities
Join Your Local Community Garden
Whether you are interested in getting your fingers and toes in the soil, turning the compost, being part of the committee, advocating for and promoting the garden, cooking community meals, running workshops, creating art for the garden or welcoming new people, there is a way you can contribute to your local community garden. However you choose to be involved, eating fresh produce from the garden is a sure reward to get you smiling!
Search the garden database to locate community gardens closest to you.
Support an Established Community Garden
All community gardens need people, infrastructure and equipment, garden inputs (such as compost and mulch) and some amount of income to survive and thrive. There are a number of community gardens already up and running in WA. You can support them by:
- Volunteering your time to assist with gardening tasks or other activities associated with managing and promoting the garden
- Donating equipment or garden inputs, such as grass clippings for compost, newspapers for sheet mulching, garden tools for working in the garden, or garden furniture for relaxing in. Make sure you check what a garden needs before making a donation!
- Providing financial support to the garden through taking out a membership, making a donation, providing sponsorship, purchasing garden products and so on
- Providing professional expertise of value to the garden on a pro bono basis
Search the garden database to find a community garden you would like to support.
Help Start a New Community Garden
Like all good community initiatives, community gardens start with one person having an idea, talking to a few people about it and energy and activity building from there. A great place to start is learning from others who have been involved in community gardens. Search our garden database to locate gardens to connect with and visit. You'll find plenty of helpful resources to get you started on our Resources to Download page and ideas for where to access support for your community gardening initiative under Connections, Financial Support and Consultants & Contractors. For more inspiration and ideas, visit the sites on our Links page.
Make Land Available for a Community Garden
Do you own some land that is currently under-utilised? Perhaps it would be a suitable site for a community garden. Community gardens can be located on1:
- Local Council owned land
- State government owned land
- Existing parks and playgrounds
- Grounds of community centres and neighbourhood houses
- Church grounds
- Grounds of housing estates, government housing and other flats
- New residential developments
- Unused private land, particularly when neglected
- Church grounds
- Old bowling greens
- Land owned by businesses
- Land near railway tracks and stations
- Roadsides
- Rooftops
- Universities
- School, kindergarten and childcare centre grounds
- Hospital and health care centre grounds
Community gardens come in all shapes and sizes, so both small and large sites can be viable. Providing land with long tenure is important to ensure community gardens are established with confidence of longevity. If you have some land that you would like to make available for a community garden, a good place to start is to talk to people in your local area and see if there is interest in the idea of a garden. For suggestions of organisations and groups who might be interested, check out our Connections page. You could also subscribe to the WA Community Garden Network's email listserver and post a message about your available land. Find more details on the email listserver here.
1 claire nettle (2010). Growing Community: Starting and nurturing community gardens. Health SA, Government of South Australia and Community and Neighbourhood Houses and Centres Association Inc, p11.
Support WA Community Garden Sector Coordination Activities
Are you interested in supporting the development of community gardens in WA at a strategic level, rather than putting your energy into an individual community garden? A number of individuals, organisations and groups in WA are working together to ensure the continuing provision of community garden sector coordination activities (for example maintaining this website, developing resource materials, hosting events, providing advice, handling media requests and advocating to governments on behalf of gardens). Experience shows us that these sorts of activities are critical if we want to see vibrant and viable community gardens across the state.
All offers of support for this work are welcome. For background on what has been achieved previously see our History page and for details on what is currently happening that you could get involved with see Current.
