Community Gardening in full bloom
Community Gardening in full bloom
The Gunnedah Urban Landcare Group Community Garden is thriving
Local Links - Stronger Communities -
LLCI022-067
The issue
The Gunnedah Urban Landcare Group Community Garden is a local volunteer initiative, driven by a dedicated group of community members passionate about nurturing capacity at a grass-roots level.
The garden itself is hosted on the Gunnedah TAFE campus, and is home to a range of vegetable and herb plots, as well as green houses for propagation of local native seedlings. These are reared to tubestock size, and used for revegetation and planting in local reserves and other areas maintained by Gunnedah Urban Landcare.
The gardeners meet every Tuesday morning to attend to planning, maintenance, planting and watering. Followed by a home-cooked morning tea shared amongst the group, the sessions provide a great opportunity to keep in touch with one another and catch up on whats happening.
The solution
Produce from the Community Garden was recently showcased at Gunnedah's inaugural 100 Mile Paddock to Plate Long Lunch, with a variety of fresh seasonal herbs featuring throughout the menu. Garden volunteers manned a market stall on the day, promoting the garden group and selling native tubestock available to guests at the event.
This was very well received, with locals loving the opportunity to source local seedstock to pant in their gardens and on their farms, including Lomandra, Kurrajong, Blakeley's Red Gum, Shoestring Acacia and River Bottlebrush.
The impact
The Community Garden represents a fabulous grass-roots community initiative, and is thriving under the care of the dedicated volunteer force currently driving it.
Providing fresh seasonal herbs and vegetables as well as locally propagated native seedstock, the Community Garden represents a great tool to showcase how to cultivate small urban plots of land; and an example of one of many ways to grow green produce for the kitchen table, as well as to cultivate native flora for revegetation.
Key facts
- The Gunnedah Urban Landcare Group Community Garden is thriving under the care and management of a strong volunteer workforce.
- Fresh, seasonal herbs and vegetables are grown, as well as locally propagated native seedstock used in the group's revegetation programs.