Start a Community Food Garden

Starred review from November 3, 2014
This delightful “handbook” by Joy, a master gardener, offers equal parts sociology skills, organizational principles, business management tips, and illustrated guides for (among other things) planting seeds with the tip of a finger. All these disparate areas of knowledge and skill are relevant to developing a community garden. As the book shows, it is a place so complex that understanding human personalities—as noted in a section called “How to Get Along”—becomes as critical as garden essentials like “How to Read a Seed Packet.” The section titled “How to Hold a Community Meeting” includes reminders about oft-overlooked logistical details as securing a venue with sufficient parking and a children’s play area. Meeting agendas, Joy says, must be precise and comprehensive and include actions items. Fund-raising, work days, group rules, and registration are all elements that must be in place before planting even starts. The section “Teaching New Gardeners” flows naturally into the helpful tips about plants’ growth habits, sun needs, and seasonal characteristics. An excellent tool that cultivates human communities as much as it grows vegetables in group gardens.

February 1, 2015

Master gardener and Peterson Garden Project executive director Joy (coauthor, Fearless Food Gardening in Chicagoland) provides a step-by-step how-to on creating a community garden from nothing but a vision. Using worksheets to form a mission statement and detailed meeting agendas, with advice on managing volunteers and creating partnerships, and tips on gardener education and seed planting, Joy offers experienced guidance and best practices for the ongoing process of community gardening. The final section of the book contains several pages of useful resources to aid the community in furthering its goals. Aimed at those who are completely unfamiliar with this type of work, the text still has plenty of suggestions for those with a little more experience. Joy has laid out the content so that it is easy for readers to skip to relevant sections. While the author stresses frequently that community gardening is full of challenging tasks and not without group conflict, the author is upbeat and encouraging about overcoming obstacles. Sometimes this comes across as being simplistic and overly optimistic. VERDICT A valuable reference for building a strong foundation for anyone new to organizing or community gardening.--Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2014
In an era when inner-city residents suffer from lack of access to fresh produce and schoolchildren have no idea about the source of the potatoes in their french fries, the establishment of community gardens can be an ideal way of nourishing both body and soul. Yet like so many good ideas, turning intentions into actions can be so daunting a prospect that nothing ever gets off the ground, so to speak. There are enough unknown factors to consider and master that even the most well-motivated group would not know where to begin. Not any more. Leaving no detail to chance, Joy's turnkey guide to project establishment and management is a masterpiece of organization, and the principles she communicates could be applied to any grassroots movement, not only community gardening. A former corporate executive and acclaimed master gardener who established Chicago's groundbreaking Peterson Garden Project, Joy successfully combines her business communication and managerial skills with her love for garden production to create an essential and accessible resource for community leaders.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)