Category: the establishment of community gardens

Starting a community garden, first steps

Article series 02

In the previous article, we talked about the history of community gardens, now we will learn about the process of establishing urban gardens.

Privately owned urban land is rarely considered, as the owner has an interest in building a store, a housing estate or a car park on the allotment, which generates money, whereas a community garden has no profit-making function. This is why municipalities and municipal land are the most likely targets, especially in residential areas. The high population density in housing estates makes recruitment easy and at the same time there are thousands of square metres of little used land in housing areas that are suitable for gardens. It is no coincidence that most of the community gardens in Budapest were created in blocks of flats.

An average community garden is about 1,000 square metres, it is important that it is close to residential areas, with enough sunlight it should be sunny, you should be able to manage irrigation water, and it should be surrounded by a fence. Without a fence there is no community garden, without a water network you cannot grow plants. The municipality tends to designate areas as gardens that are either functionless or have lost their former function. We have had gardens built on the site of a long-defunct playground, another garden on the site of an old, long-defunct park, and gardens that were illegal dog runs. What should be avoided, for example, is to take land from an existing well functioning park to use as a community garden, this is very wrong, it should be avoided.

Today it is not difficult to convince municipalities of the benefits of establishing a community garden, this is now commonplace and obvious, it was a bit different before. Today, the problem is more a lack of quality and a lack of thought in the projects. Some municipalities think that it is enough to build the garden and it will work well. The reality is that it is not that simple, unfortunately we have seen many really embarrassingly failed garden launches in recent years. The peculiarity of a botched garden is that there are no professionals involved in the establishment, there is no concept of developing the garden community, there is no garden management or it is done by an incompetent person, there is no gardening education, there are no community events, everyone is just making their own bed, and the garden as a whole is in the process of being ruined.

The first step was to get the attention of the municipality. The task was to demonstrate the community gardens, how they work and, most importantly, why they are worthwhile for the municipality, through a spectacular presentation, using international examples. At the beginning, everyone liked the initiative, but the realisation was difficult, mainly because of the untried and new nature of the idea. If the Mayor says yes to the development, the hard part starts from there. Municipalities are quite complex organisations, with many laws and regulations affecting their operation, and there is also the representative body who ultimately have to vote on the garden establishment. In the very first municipal community garden, the Első Kis-Pesti Kert almost every municipal committee and department had a word in the project, and all had to be approved and supported before the garden could be started. This took nearly a year, with legal negotiations, financial planning, property management, voting by the Board of Representatives, etc. Ultimately, the aim is to ensure that the Community Garden is included in the municipal budget for the next financial year, that capital is allocated to it and that the conditions for its design, construction and operation are clarified, and that it is legally and contractually implemented. The council and the departments will only give the project the go-ahead if they are certain that the future garden is destined to succeed and cannot fail. The council’s primary concern is that the garden shoul be a success, that they have as few problems with it as possible, that it does not cause them any trouble or extra work. Of course, this is understandable, municipal work is a profession full of stress and problems, they don’t need another confrontation, they have enough.

The fundamental secret to the survival of urban community gardens is a kind of common benefit, a “win-win” situation for gardeners, neighbourhood residents, the municipality and city (district) leaders, in which everyone finds the benefits of the gardens accruing to them. What are these benefits?

The benefits of community gardeners

First and foremost, benefits are not necessarily a monetary value, and in fact in gardens we are talking more about benefits that cannot be bought with money. The benefits of gardeners are somewhere in the range of: busyness, responsibility and a sense of achievement, a sense of enrichment, pride, a caring experience, a life perspective, satisfaction, physical well-being, health-mental benefits, quantity of crops, learning new skills, community experience, educational processes, children in the garden, cooperation with others, closeness to nature, conversations, fame, press coverage. And of course, your own produce. There are so many benefits. Everyone can choose the one that is most important to them.

In a community garden, ten percent of the time is gardening, ninety percent is community life: tending beds and common areas, garden meetings, conversations, occasional garden parties, playing with children and relaxing. Getting away from the routine of home or work, blending into a wider group, is something everyone needs. There are so many different things to talk about in a garden, so many new stories to hear, while the garden and its plants give us a sense of occupation and pleasure. In the summer, when the heat is barely bearable, the garden is the place to relax, cool off, have fun and talk a lot. Today, when loneliness is almost a universal disease, the community garden is the best catalyst for making friends, talking to others, feeling important, becoming part of an active community.

Of course, the quantity of crops is very important. Growing your own produce is always better and healthier than buying it, and it has a special bond with the gardener. Moreover, you can harvest an amazing amount of produce from a bed of 5-7 square metres, and at a time when we are seeing unprecedented increases in the price of fruit and vegetables, this is what counts. And interestingly, the benefits only increase from here, as raw vegetables are turned into food, another level of creativity and another sense of achievement is garnered. In the gardens, recipes are a serious topic of conversation, who makes what from their produce, and gardeners regularly bring in tasters. When we have garden parties, you can taste them and be proud of our culinary art.

In some gardens, especially in the first season, we did garden statistics. The idea is that everyone measures their own crops and we put them together in a chart. 2023 in the Böszi Barden ( Budapest XII district, Böszörményi út) the following data came out at the end of the season.

366 kg of tomatoes, 25 kg of peppers, 26 kg of eggplants, 148 kg of cucumbers, 145 kg of courgettes, 45 kg of pumpkins, 14 kg of melons, 13 kg of carrots, 22 kg of batata, 10 kg of kohlrabi, 30 kg of green beans and so on. In total, 51 crops are included in the statistics, and there was almost a tonne of produce. It was a good season for the garden.

Numbers in the Community Gardens

These volumes are of course also expressed in money terms and the quality was very high. Own produce. It is very important to note that the produce of the community garden is not for sale, it is for personal use and self-sufficiency. This is laid down in the garden rules and in the garden contract and applies to all gardens.

Benefits for the district, the neighbourhood and the municipality

Urban green spaces are overused, very difficult to maintain and extremely expensive. The natural need of city residents is for their living environment to be as green as possible and to be as flowery as possible. At the same time, city residents themselves are rather careless with the environment, littering, polluting and destroying their green surroundings, whether for a reason or not. In addition, gardening is extremely expensive, a serious expense for local authorities year after year.

For a municipality, to designate a thousand square metres of land, build a good quality urban garden on it, spend money on community development, to start the garden, is a minimal investment compared to the annual budget of the municipality, but what you get in return is far more than the investment cost. For example: the district will be enriched with a very active neighbourhood community, a very high quality, biodiverse garden, a positive press coverage, both in the local press and in the national press. The garden is shaping the image of the district, is a new and popular initiative, and is featured in all district publications, films and environmental events. The garden is self-sustaining, it needs to be built once and then it runs itself, it gets more beautiful every year, the maintenance costs to the municipality are minimal.(It’s worthwhile for the municipality to count some amortization costs for the gardens and to help the garden develop, but it’s not a big item.) The garden communities don’t just exist within the fence, they appear at district events, host kindergarten and school classes in the garden, for example in the framework of the “Biology Lessons in the Community Garden” programme, to which the residents of the area and other NGOs are invited. The community gardens hold open days, members take part in district green actions, many researchers and graduate students study the gardens, this is also a reputation, this is also a benefit.

The urban garden is a small model of how we can live better, create a better quality of life, cultivate ourselves and our communities, our beds, our environment and the neighbourhoods where we live, within the city. Moreover, the district leadership can be a partner in this, working together towards a good goal.

Read More

History of Community Gardens

Article series 01

Introduction, preface, purpose of the article series

I was asked by the Hungarian Kertbarát Magazin to write a series of articles on the topic of community gardens, which I would like to share in English on this website. In the coming months I will translate six articles into English, covering the following topics, as he history of community gardens, community garden establishment – start-up, planning, design and implementation, community development and education, and managing the first season.

As the Urban Gardens Association, I have established nine community gardens in Budapest since 2012. All the gardens are located on municipal land, are a municipal investment, and we have recruited community gardeners from the neighbourhood, basically creating neighbourhood communities. As a garden manager, my role was to develop the community garden, coordinate the garden and successfully complete the first season. This includes everything from planning, to training, to a successful first season and everything that goes with community gardening. With each garden start, the goal is for the community to be self-sustaining within a year, to be self-organising, to continue the garden and community the following season, and for me to leave and start a new garden. In many ways there is a kind of organisational development process where the organisation is the garden community itself and the aim is to sustain and run the garden on an ongoing basis.

In the early 2000s, in New York, I saw 40-50 year old community gardens that were beautifully run, although they didn’t even know who the first gardeners were, who the founder was? In a way, that’s what urban gardens are supposed to do, beautify neighborhoods and develop neighborhood communities, bring permanence and beauty to their surroundings, semi-independently of the actual gardeners. The garden as a permanent site, nature as an ever-changing challenge, provides so much task and pleasure that it is possible to perpetuate the operation of an urban garden, season after season, theoretically forever.

In my own life, community gardens emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, as a college professor I lectured to students about the Great Depression of 1929-32 and that was my first exposure to crisis and war gardens. Let’s start from there…

Crisis gardens, war gardens, Cuba, modern American community gardens

During the Great Depression of 1929 in the United States, two types of crisis gardens were used, one to support self-sufficient individual gardens with tools and seeds, and the other to produce basic crops (potatoes, carrots, onions, tomatoes, etc.) for free public and school catering.

If we take a narrow view of the concept of the community garden today and do not look towards initiatives such as the garden city movement (which deserves a separate article), the birth of modern urban community gardens has always been linked to a period of crisis, whether it be war or economic crisis. Initially, their aim was to create partial food self-sufficiency and to employ the unemployed. In the First World War these self-sufficient gardens and the self-sufficiency movement were called Liberty Gardens and in the Second World War Victory Gardens. All sides in the war were concerned about the food supply of the population, so government-sponsored programs were the urban-rural self-sufficiency garden movements. They did so with great success, so much so that by 1918, in World War I, figures show that more than 5.2 million war garden plots had been established in the US, producing $525 million in crops.

The situation was similar during the Second World War, when the movement was called Victory Gardens. Britain was in a special predicament, as the naval blockade put them in a particularly difficult position, and for them, in addition to the strict rationing system, getting rid of starvation meant becoming self-sufficient. England’s food supply from the industrial revolution depended on food produced in the colonies, they were not self-sufficient in food.

Modern community gardens – the beginnings

Urban community gardens in the modern sense of the word can actually be traced back to the late 1960s, when Liz Chisty and her team of Green Guerillas founded a community garden on a deserted street corner in New York City (Bowery Houston Farm and Garden 1972), followed by several other gardens. The urban garden movements emerged after the student unrest of 1968 died down, and these green movements carried the momentum of the student revolts forward. Interestingly, the change of regime in Hungary 1989 also started as an ecological – environmental movement against the regulation of the Danube river and the construction of power plants, under the name of the Danube Circle.

New York in the sixties and seventies experienced a severe economic crisis, public safety had reached catastrophic levels, the city was full of empty lots, bankrupt factories, rust belts, land that attracted crime, full of with garbage , problems for everyone. One of the objectives of the Green Guerrilla movement was to prevent crime by illegally occupying vacant urban land, greening it and maintaining a permanent presence and establishing neighbourhood communities that looked after each other. Interestingly, it was only in 2013 that New York City adopted the legal status of community gardens and included them in the city’s green register system. All this happened under the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg. Since then, the Green Thumb, the hallmark of a good gardener, has been established to provide central support for urban community gardens within the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. They currently have 550 community gardens.

In 1978, a non-profit garden association was formed in the USA, the American Community Gardening Association, which organises community gardens in the United States and Canada, with 14,000 registered gardens. This movement is clearly no longer just about food production – although there is certainly a factor at work in the rapidly rising inflation, oil crisis, urban poverty, and the uplift of marginalised groups – but also about improving the vitality of cities, bringing people and ethnic groups together, and trying to respond locally to environmental degradation and, in many cases, creating alternative cultural venues.

The urban climate change of the last decade, and especially the environmental rethinking of cities and urbanised areas, has given a new boost to the community garden movement worldwide. Community-maintained gardens and parks are becoming part of the urban ecosystem, they are gaining attention and are even a positive call to action for policy makers and city and district leaders, a positive initiative worthy of active support.

Detroit, the city of crisis gardens

It is interesting to note that in the last decades, cities and communities in crisis in the United States have rediscovered the crisis garden movement, such as Detroit, once one of the richest cities in the US, the capital of the automotive and military industries, but now a run-down, unpromising metropolis, one of the most unlivable cities in the US. In recent years, a self-sufficient garden movement has taken off, much like the gardens of the Great Depression, growing food on a large scale and trying to hold together crumbling communities.

Cuba the crisis garden country

The other modern example of a crisis garden comes from Cuba in the early 1990s. During the Cold War period, Cuba produced and shipped sugar and tobacco to the socialist countries in a monoculture-like way, in exchange for finished goods, fertiliser and oil. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba suffered a massive economic crisis, and its previously well-funded economy collapsed. Food shortages developed in the country, so free land was distributed among the inhabitants – any city resident could get land suitable for gardening in the cities or on the outskirts of the city. More than half of Havana’s fruit and vegetable consumption came from community gardens, and there was also small-scale livestock farming. Community gardens in Cuba not only provide food for their members, but also have enough produce to support schools, hospitals and the elderly, and even have surpluses to sell in local markets. By the 2000s, 500 community markets were operating across Cuba, 30-50% cheaper than state shops. No one in the country is starving, despite decades of US embargoes. One of the most interesting things about their example is that they have achieved these results through organic farming: they use no fuel, no fertilisers and no special pesticides to produce their food. This process is beautifully illustrated in the documentary film “The Power of Community”.

Első Kis-Pesti Kert 2012, Budapest

In 2012, I founded my first garden in the 19th district of Budapest, in cooperation with the local government, the Első Kis-Pesti Kert. The garden is 12 years old this year, it works perfectly, and in the last decade it has flourished, it is a kind of miracle how many different plants can grow on a thousand square metres, if they are well cared for. The Első Kis Pesti kert is so successful that for years it has won the national competition for the Best Kitchen Garden, Community Garden category, and last year it was awarded the permanent title.

This year I’m starting my ninth garden, all of them working well. There are no perfect gardens, they are made up of plants and people, they are affected by nature, the weather, the interactions of garden members, garden pests, you could go on and on about how many variables there are in a community garden. Community gardens exist along life cycle models, in part the plant population has its own life cycle, and the garden community evolves along a life cycle, similar to the way a company is organized. Organizational development and community building have many similarities. Establishing a community garden is partly a process of organization, law, landscape design, education, and community development.

In the following sections, I will introduce the process of starting a community, urban garden, the first steps of starting a garden, and the benefits of community gardens.

Read More